Medium is appealling
When I first started blogging, there was no blog software. I know that’s an admission of my age. I’d start my blogs by copying and pasting basic empty templates of HTML into a long page. It was simple. Then Blogger came along to make that easy to do, then Moveable Type lured me with it’s beautiful themes, and ultimately WordPress was simple to install … which is what my blog runs on now.
In recent weeks I’ve had to do some WordPress work for my employer. And it truly opened my eyes. These are some reasons why I’d like to stop using it:
WordPress lends itself better to creating desktop web pages
I know that’s a sweeping statement – you can certainly find ‘responsive themes’ – but are the pieces that plug in responsive too? Do they play well side by side? This was a troublesome area for our work – takes a lot of thought.
PHP is no fun
None at all. I’m used to working with CSS, HTML and JS. PHP adds an unwelcome and distracting layer for me. It’s neither one thing nor another. It’s inelegant and clumsy to write with. It doesn’t inspire me.
SPAM
No amount of filtering seems to keep it away. Do comments matter anymore? Social media seems to be the place for comments for the most-part these days. Also as the new wave of syndication.
I’ve seen enough hints at the future – with client side data retrieval mechanisms, and with the exciting new web components standards to believe that blogging and content management will need to really evolve in the near future.
I’ve been experimenting with a simple blogging approach for a personal project that I want to work on. It would be based on typing markdown into Google Spreadsheets – and would be a hark back to my original blogging approach.
However … I think Medium ( from the makers of Twitter ) is an exciting glimpse of the future of blogging. Beautiful, elegant, simple blog posts, curated into helpfully organized categories. Easy to search, consume and ( as I understand it ) write.
Can’t wait for an invite.







