Blogging Medium

 I promised as part of Blaugust 2025 that I would talk about and maybe search for a new blogging platform.  I've been on Google's Blogger (aka Blogspot) for over 20 years now and it hasn't had a major update of any sort in several years.  Before I get to exploration of entirely new platforms I do want to talk about a couple that I did already try.  The first one up is Medium and I have some thoughts.

 First, you can visit my experiment on Medium here:  https://medium.com/@heartlessgamer 

 What I liked about Medium is it's clean design. Black text, white background, and no effort to make that simple and clean template become a reality.  Also attractive at the time I tried it was the fact it can import Blogger posts with just a couple clicks so it was easy to port in content for testing purposes.

 A couple features I liked but didn't get to experience were the ability for visitors to leave me private messages as well as the ability to add a "tip the author" option on posts.  I could do the tip thing via any number of services with my blogger blog but that'd take extra effort vs the integrated option with Medium. 

 What I didn't like was that Medium felt like an ecosystem where I was just another cog in the grand scheme.  It felt like I was just putting my posts into a social media platform vs running my own blog.  I also dislike that Medium, like other platforms I investigated, require a cost to use your own custom domain.  It is hard to beat the fact that Blogger supports your own domain at no cost.

 Ultimately Medium didn't hook me and I gave up on it shortly after starting. I wouldn't say it is "off the list" because the member fee is only $5 a month which is not terrible compared to other platforms I'll talk more about in the coming days.