As most developers having an own self made website, every time you think of blogging or technical writing, you end up creating a new website or optimization for yourself first. 😅 So did I originally; I was tweaking my website more than doing actual writing 🙄
Until at some point I decided to take a third party blogging tool, that focuses on writing and takes care of "the rest", preferably having the least amount of friction between an idea and a published post.
So I looked for a hosted solution...
dev.to / DEV
Enter DEV. It is an amazing platform to just start writing. To see if it would fit me, I wrote a couple of things here. The platform has a very simple layout, writing is quick and effortless and it takes no time to get your idea out there.
Furthermore it's free, it gives good SEO ranking and allows you to connect your privately owned site too with canonical URLs.
Finally, the organization behind DEV are sympathetic. They promote and facilitate many initiatives (e.g. International Women's Day, minorities in tech), seem very inclusive, open sourced their tech and have a merchandise shop!
Hashnode
But then, there is also Hashnode.
Some people on Twitter nudged me over to look at that. It has cool things like your own website (with custom pages!) on a custom domain. All for free too! So I created an account, created my site and started cross posting my blogs. They even have import tools to get started quickly with already written content.
But some things are not so good. For instance the overall navigation and "getting around": The difference between your profile (with a feed, about section, etc) and your website/blog for example. What to put where? It seems you have your "profile" and settings on the Hashnode platform, besides your website/blog that also has a profile with settings. Things are clunky and confusing.
Another thing I did not like was the speed. Every click takes about 3 seconds before the page is ready loading. It just is not snappy.
But, in the end you get your free custom domain, free website with custom pages, etc. etc. so I did not complain. Even better, if I want to in the future, I can easily use their Newsletter feature to add that to my Hashnode site too!
So I even almost decided to go for Hashnode as my default platform.
Who's reading?
But then, today, I saw some Analytics of exact same posts on both dev.to and Hashnode. dev.to is found and read way more than Hashnode. Sometimes almost 100 times better!
For instance:
- A small piece about how to deploy Deno on Cloud run: 484 views on Dev.to, 1 on Hashnode.
- When Rails 6 was new, something about creating a new project with Docker: 2886 views, 12 hearts and 3 comments on Dev.to. 52 views and no responses on Hashnode 🤷♂️
- I made this boilerplate for a new Next.js project with Bulma and Typescript and wrote about it. Dev.to got 2031 views and 4 reactions. Hashnode just 21 views.
Conclusion
So, if I want to write something, not only for myself, but also for the world to be able to take an advantage of it, I'd better use dev.to.
And it gives me added benefits as well:
- Loading of pages is nice and quick (as it should be)
- There is one place to manage and discover content (not a separate own site, etc.)
- No more brain clutter / decision fatigue with thinking about what customizations to make on my website (because that does not matter anymore)
- Just posting on ONE spot → https://dev.to/rogiervandenberg
Am I missing things on DEV?
Well yes, it would still be nice to point my custom domain to my dev.to profile. Furthermore, an automated backup of my content to e.g. a github repo (as Hashnode has) would be great.
Happy writing! 👋
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