On my website, I post different stuff:
I could have used Medium for tech blogposts, Marmiton for recipes, Good Reads for writing books comments, Flickr to post my images, Instructable to store my tutorials.
The question is “why do I avoid these websites dedicated to that ?”.
Here, I have a single website, where anyone can access to all that stuff. Otherwise, I would need at lest 5 accounts, one for each service. I would need more to cover all the possible platforms to reach a larger audience and avoid someone from stealing the content. Each service would have its format, the size required for the picture, markdown VS HTML, and other things that takes time for nothing. It would still be possible to link to this website. Writing an article takes time. It is not as easy as non-writer people may think. Adding the management of 10 accounts would be a nightmare.
It is very rate nowadays to find website without any adds. All these “informative” websites, with free access to their content make money thanks to adds. Contributors are not paid. It is understandable that people hosting the content need to pay for the servers, for the improvement they makes to the UX and UI. However, these platform would be nothing without contributors. This is not a fair share.
If tomorrow the service is shut down, my data would not exist anymore. Here, I am responsible of that. I have my copies on my disks and somewhere in the cloud, and the version published on Neocities. If tomorrow one of these three items is broken, I just need to switch and replace. Because I have it on local, I can access it whenever I want without any lag.
On the Internet, people tend to think they are anonymous because they can select dummy pseudo like
xx_girl_21. They tend to forget about “social code” or “way of behaving” correctly with people. The web is full of good people, but it’s easier for bad people to do the mess. Here, you cannot comment, click on like/dislike. I don’t really care, my value is not \(x\) likes + \(y\) comments. People that really want to contact me would have no difficulties to find my email address and write a message.
Writing text takes time. By writing articles, you learn how to organize your ideas and to present them. That’s valuable skills. But knowing how to code is also valuable. Coding your own website is one way to prove it to yourself that you are able to do it. Also, you can customize everything. You are not limited to a fixed template. It takes a lot of time before to configure everything properly the first time. The next one, it would be easier to do.
I do. The one I enjoy the most is Instructable, where people try to document homemade project the best they can. Honestly, if I had more time, I would publish there. However, for my project, I don’t take the time to build the pattern (I made one, but adjusted it hundreads of time). So, this is still an option.
For cooking website, the number of duplicata is incredible, and the number of photograph that are taken from another recipe is frightening. For medium, sometimes you learn something, sometimes you learn nothing. People often publish for the masses, this is not specialized literature. For Goodreads, people often give their impression about the book. Do they like it or not. I would like more to know “what is it about ?”, “What would I learn ?”, “What is the writting style ?”, “How detailed is the bibliography ?”
In this website, post are organized by date. I have some project done in the past that I may publish one day to have the images available. I would not have this freedom elsewhere.
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