As with anything that is meant to grow over time, when starting out you are often faced with the harsh reality that it’s going to be a while until you can show off the fruits of your labour. This blog is no different, and if you’re following it at the time of writing (thanks for being an early supporter by the way! 🥳) you might have noticed that, even though it’s 2020 I have already posted some entries dating back as far as 2017. What’s going on here?
# Don’t keep all your eggs in the same basket
One of the reasons for creating this blog was redundancy. If you follow a company or tech-savvy writer, you’ve probably noticed that some publish their content to a couple of outlets, usually their own blog and their Medium/reddit/facebook/whatever wall. This is in part to be where the action’s at, to get easy clicks on whatever platform is currently trending. However, there’s also the issue of content ownership; you know, those fine lines that we all so eagerly pretend to read when signing up for a website, and that more often than not state that the place where you publish your written work has no legal obligation to make it easy for you to keep it or maintain it.
Imagine that Medium implemented an even harsher paywall tomorrow, and suddenly it loses a bunch of its readers. If Medium loses readers, so do you, and that can snowball fast. Now imagine that Medium just dies off. It could happen, albeit farfetched. Can you salvage your past content? If not, do you have to start fresh on another platform? What about all the other writers that also lost their content? Everyone is back at square one and competing for those precious clicks and eyeballs. Yikes! 😨
Here’s a couple of posts on this topic, but you can find plenty more out there, and the gist of it is always the same. In fact, this whole ordeal reminds me of one of cryptocurrencies’ popular maxims:
Not your keys, not your coins.
Maybe this can be a topic for another day. 🤔 Don’t forget to subscribe to stay in the loop.
# Porting my content from Medium
If you’re familiar with the markdown language you’re probably aware of it’s dominance on the tech-savvy web. It lets you create easy-to-write and easy-to-render documents that can be processed by virtually any word processor. Another very handy application of markdown is that it is easily convertible to HTML, in fact, this blog’s posts are written in markdown which then gets converted into the beautiful™ sight you are seeing right now.
What does this all have to do with content on Medium? Well, I’ve written a couple of blogposts on there, and since I thought that this blog could use with a bit more content when starting out, I decided to download them and add them here. While searching for a way to retrieve my content, I came across this post (ironically, hosted on Medium) which detailed how to export one’s Medium stories as markdown files.
The end result wasn’t flawless, but it definitely did the job! As far as I could tell, it only struggled with embedded <iframe> elements and the spacing surrounding list items, but after a few tweaks I got the exported markdown to look pretty much like the original Medium story. I’ll let you judge for yourself: tweaked markdown & original medium post
Behold! The field in which I grow my
fucksposts. Lay thine eyes upon it and thou shalt see that it is no longer barren.