Hey everyone, welcome to my blog’s new home! I guess it’s only my second post, can I even say I had a home elsewhere? 🤔 Anyways, today’s post is on my journey to ditch Medium and on using Notion as my new blog + personal landing space on the web!
Issues with Medium
- It lacked formatting: I found myself fighting with Medium more than focusing on creating the content for the post
- Very basic support for content blocks: As excited as I was to create the post, I was quickly discouraged by the limited content I could add into a Medium article.
- Platform overload: In a day and age when there’s 345634665 different SaaS platforms available to complete a single task I didn’t want to add another platform to my list.
- Their iPad app is 🗑️ : I love using my iPad to work from anywhere and wanted to use it to create my first post but the app was horrendous. I think it goes back to how they design their layouts and I kept getting stuck creating my post. Eventually I gave up and went to use my main computer but that right there ties me down to a desk; NOT what I’m looking for.
Love for Notion
- SO MANY FORMATTING OPTIONS: I could create anything I could possibly need for the most part directly in Notion without a fuss, exactly what I need as I create content
- Simple layouts: I love the simple elegant layout that comes with Notion
- It simply works: This is one of the biggest sell points, the iPad app is amazing, especially compared to Medium’s and that’s what everyone needs. An application that’s powerful, easily accessible and also very intuitive.
In my workflow I’d create my blog notes in Notion and then I’d transfer the ideas over to Medium. Yeah I could create the draft notes in Medium but I wasn’t very excited to use the platform. I understand the appeal for some, but the thing is, I need a little more spice and that’s why I love Notion ❤️
Because of the formatting options and simple layouts that I loved with Notion I was on the hunt to find something similar as a blogging platform; that was until I discovered this template. I stumbled upon it when searching templates for a side project and didn’t even know something like this was possible! I set some time aside to jump into his setup guide and it as well worth the effort. Within ~1hr I was up and running on Vercel and was able to replace my old site with this new template!
Note: Out of the box you will need to rebuild your site every time you make a post publicly visible. Once the path is setup you can update the page as much as you wish with instant updates.
I definitely hit some speed bumps along the way but once I slowed down to read the instructions and jumped into the code a bit, I was back on track. I highly recommend checking out the template and giving it a go 👌
Thanks for reading, happy hacking everyone! 👨💻