New blog - moving from Medium to Gridsome

Welcome to my new blog!

I redesigned a few things - but the biggest change is that I moved here posts from various sources.

Changed

• The blog post list is sortable, in a weighted way. To see how it works, pick any combination of date and popularity.
• There used to be two lists of posts, one for posts I host, and the other for published elsewhere. It was confusing - so I created a single list. Where it is published is an "implementation detail".
• Copied all posts from Medium here. This deserves a separate thread - which I provide below.
• Switched from Google Analytics to Plausible, which is simpler and more respectful of privacy.
• Slightly different naming. This post is /blog/2022/12/new-blog-from-medium-to-gridsome rather than /2022/12/29/new-blog-from-medium-to-gridsome.html. Yet, I made sure that all old links work.
• A lot of technical things that make it more enjoyable for me to develop.

Picking Gridsome

Gridsome is a Vue-based static site generator. It was a no-brainer to go for static sites - much easier to write and deploy, and I don't need any server. Also, for evergreen content, it is likely to stay much longer.

Gatsby, which is React-based, is way more popular and actively developed. I am all for the React philosophy, including that it uses JavaScript for templating rather than some made-up syntax. Yet, in Gatsby the simplest things (such as blog post routing) there are many ways to go. It felt like giving me tools rather than solutions. In a contrast, in Gridsome things worked out of the box.

So, I picked Gridsome. I already use Vue (especially in Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap). And it just works.

Moving from Jekyll

This one was easy. Just a few path changes, both for content and internal links. A few regular expressions did the job.

Moving from Medium

Medium is a blog posting platform. Anyone can create an account and start writing.

Why

For some time a lot of tech community started writing there, myself included. Now it has less favorable opinions - to the point that the Hackers News crowd seems to hate Medium. I share some (but not all) of the concerns. However:

• I write for the readers. And the readers' experience matters.
• I want to have all of my writings in one place, rather than distributed among various platforms.
• I like to create the whole website according to my needs (and quirks).
• And, well, I can.

So, to be clear - I don't boycott anything. My Medium blog posts stay there, I even link them here. But all of the changes

Moreover, if you want to write your first post, I recommend Medium by all means!

How

Moving from Medium needed a few steps:

• Downloading blog posts locally, see export your account data.
• Turning them into Markdown with medium-2-md.
• Using a custom Python script to put images nicely in folders and to process some parts of the front matter. The script in the as-it-is form is here.
• Converting images to jpg (many png were large, and I wanted to keep a typical image file around 100kB). Used mogrify, mogrify -format jpg *.png. Also, gifs are not supported - so turned them into jpgs or pngs.
• Manual changes to set thumbnails, create frontmatter (e.g. tags), add image captions (they were lost by medium-2-md), some other changes (e.g. for an unknown reason Gridsome does not display two or more subsequent images).

If I had to do it for the second time, I guess I would write my own library for turning Medium posts into Markdown suitable for Gridsome (or any other static blog).

What's next?

The source is here https://github.com/stared/stared.github.io.