When I decided to commit more to writing, one of the questions I had to answer is where to publish?
I had a blogger blog, then Google bought the platform and abandoned it, making it representing the early era of blogging with no connection to web 3.0. Then I blogged for sometime on Facebook, better reach, but hard to drive meaningful conversations, more noise than signal, and not SEO friendly.
In the middle I tried self hosted WordPress. I also tried Ghost, which was a new promising publishing platform. It got stuck and I had to move from there.
Medium was very trendy at the time and everyone was moving their blogs there. I decided not to fall again into the controlled platform trap. Once they get bought they ruin your content and your ability to do more.
I went for WordPress. I spent a year using the cloud hosted WordPress. It was satisfactory to some extent but it still lacked features I wanted. Most of the themes weren’t supported. I couldn’t customize it to what I wanted so when the year ended, I moved to the good old days of self hosted WordPress.
I now have total control over my content. WordPress is open source. It is used to run est 15-20% of internet websites. It has been there for long and it is going to stay.
Now that I have my website, I need a way to get it in front of the audience. I am not interested in generating traffic, I just want the people who might be interested to find the content easily. As a result I setup a newsletter that sends you new posts I publish. I also have a IFTTT recipe that automatically publishes new posts to medium (this way if medium dies, I have nothing to lose).
The only mystery that remains is LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn reach is very good, however its publishing platform is hard to use. I can’t publish posts using my mobile phone (which I now use to write almost half of my posts). I can’t use a 3rd party to automatically publish new posts there. I ended up not putting everything I write there.
I hope LinkedIn fixes their problems, and I hope I keep writing.