The reason I decided to have a blog on my website in the first place was so that it was in one place with everything else–my contact details and my portfolio.

I started this blog in 2018 and though I’d been a reader on Medium for a few months at that point, it was only in January of this year that I decided to try writing there. So, I posted my Guide to GSoC post and was impressed by how easy it was to write on Medium.

I liked the clean UI and accessibility. My favorite feature was the easy editing–simply edit your post, and save your changes, and they’re live. Compare that with my site where I had to do the following to add a missing comma:

  • pull the latest changes from GitHub
  • make the change locally
  • commit, tag and push to GitHub

Of course, this doesn’t take more than a few minutes, but its pretty frustrating when you have to this several times for the same post, since I still find some formatting issues, rendering issues and typos even after proof-reading my posts.

This isn’t to say that Medium is the perfect blogging site (though its somewhere at the top in my humble opinion). Medium doesn’t support markdown or latex rendering (another reason I hosted my blog on my Jekyll site to begin with). This isn’t an issue when you blog about, say, personal growth, where your post would just be text and images. Unfortunately for me, I blog about tech–specifically, computer science and I think I’ve written just one post in the last two years which didn’t have any equations. The solution? Use images.

Of course, creating images is time consuming but you get faster over time.

Neither option is perfect, and I was on the fence for about a year. But as I mentioned earlier, the instant editing and the clean UI convinced me enough to switch to Medium.

So what’s the future of this blog? I’ll of course keep the entire website updated with my latest projects and professional endeavors but I’ll also share links to my Medium posts on this blog. This way, I’ll kind of get the best of both worlds, where I’ll be able use the UI and editing features I’m obsessing about while also keeping everything updated and in one place.

Let’s see how it goes…