I've had a long break from blogging, nearly three years. (Corporate job, family, the usual reasons.) Recently I finally managed to put together a 5000-word piece I'm happy with and my friends politely found awesome, as they must. So I posted it on Medium because that platform worked well for me back around 2017.
It seems that, while I was busy with life, Medium has fallen out of favor. The organic traffic is nothing like I saw back in the day, and the general vibe I hear is that, at some point, Medium managed to put off a lot of people with shenanigans around paywalls and stuff.
Where should one go these days to publish a long-read deep dive into a particular technology? My post is the first part of a series that will probably end up being around 15k words total. I'd like to put it up somewhere that might have a shot at offering the kind of on-platform discovery Medium used to have.
But if that doesn't exist anymore, I guess I'll just go with publishing on my own domain. I've heard that there are some excellent static site generators for this kind of thing. Any advice there?
I personally use a very basic generator I wrote myself in Python, but Hugo and Zola are pretty neat beginner-friendly generators among the ones I've seen.
If you're using a CMS, WordPress is still king. Ghost is not bad either.