Moving my personal website out of Blogger and Wordpress — why and what replaced it - Medium

Sign in

Sign in
Aswin Rajeev
Follow
--
Listen
Share
For quite long, I have been invested in having a portfolio website and over the last few years I tried several options to implement it — from content management systems like Blogger and Wordpress, to custom hosted solution. I wanted to share what worked for me finally and why.
I started writing blogs as early as 2010 while I was an undergraduate, and I started using Blogger. Blogger was very popular that time and had decent engagement as well. My writings through my blog that time was largely on thoughts around socially relevant topics and less tech-based or experience-based articles.
Here is what I lacked with my blog hosted on Blogger:
This is when I decided to switch to Wordpress.
Wordpress was way better than Blogger and supported many of my requirements out of the box. I could get a free theme that was reasonably good — I did some customisations using CSS though, create any number of pages as I wished and set of those as my landing page, and even the writing experience was way better. I was content with my Wordpress site, except for one aspect — cost!
I wanted my own domain for my website. To setup my own domain, I had to get a paid plan. Just having the website itself would cost me somewhere between ₹4000 to ₹6000, excluding the cost of domain. For my first renewal, I spent around ₹8000 for one year, including the hosting and the domain. Given that I do not have any tangible income from the website, this was way too much to spent for me.
In addition, there were other minor issues too:
Finally I decided to switch to Medium — given its popularity and the user experience. I was deliberating for a while on if I should go with the membership or the free tier and then decided to go with the free tier for the time being, primarily due to the following reasons:
I decided to defer the decision on if I should enrol as a Medium member, although the amount is still less that what I used to pay for my Wordpress site. In the meanwhile, I set up a redirect of my domain’s blog CNAME (blog.aswin.me) to my medium subdomain (aswinrajeev.medium.com) through RedirectPizza.
All this allowed me to have a better experience writing the blog posts and a nicer feel for the readers as well. Also, I am getting significantly more reach and engagement through Medium. I might avail the Medium membership soon for better engagement and the benefits it offers for a reader, but most of my content would still be freely available.
As I mentioned earlier, I was particular about having a personal home page, which Medium does not offer. So I had to figure out something else. Fortunately, GitHub Pages came to the rescue.
I created a React (next.js) based web application for the homepage and hosted it using GitHub pages. GitHub provides free hosting for static websites. I set up complete Full-CD pipeline using GitHub Workflows which would automatically update and deploy my site with every change I make. And then I did the custom domain setup, which pointed my personal domain aswin.me to the GitHub page.
The web application I created contained whatever static content I needed for my personal site — a brief bio, about me, a brief portfolio, ways to contact etc. I could have created the blog also in GitHub Pages using Jekyll, but I preferred the much more streamlined experience with Medium.
I wanted one last thing — a listing of my recent blog posts. I decided to use Medium RSS feed for this. The web application would basically fetch the Medium feed and construct a blog-roll. But there is a catch — Medium supports fetching RSS feed only from a server, not from the client. Since GitHub does not provide server support, the RSS feed could not be directly fetched from the web application. That was a stalemate! Well, not really. I had two options:
Option 1 was straightforward , but had a risk of incurring unexpected charges if there is a burst of traffic to the Lambda endpoint (through some bot traffic, for example). So I decided to go with option 2. Remember I mentioned that GitHub supports Full-CD through GitHub workflows? Well that part ought to be handled by the server, right? So I decided to put a small fetch operation during the build which would update the feed content. I would just need to trigger the build-and-deploy once every post is published in medium.
And that completed the last leg of what I needed for my personal website (although the blog roll is still under development and not released yet).
Finally, by simply using Medium as the blogging platform and hosting the my personal portfolio website on GitHub Pages, I could save over ₹5000 per year (I still spend around ₹1500 for the domain though, which in my opinion is justifiable). Also Medium gave a better experience in terms of engagement and overall reader/writer experience.
Hosting the personal website through GitHub pages provided immense customisability and provided a good learning as well — implementing a web applicaiton using React/Next.js and setting up continuous deployment pipelines. A few ongoing development works, like implementation of blog rolls, add some dynamicity to the website and makes it complete.
--
--
Software Development Engineer (SDE II) at Amazon with over 10 years of experience in software engineering. https://www.aswin.me
Help
Status
About
Careers
Blog
Privacy
Terms
Text to speech
Teams

source