What’s this blog? (And what about Medium?)

Or why I rent just another server now…

It’s not that I don’t have enough server and domain costs etc., because I have bought 7 domains in the last few years and besides the server on which I host my homepage (for 1€ per month) I also use Carrd (approx. 40€ per year) and Fastmail (5€ per month).

Why don’t I continue to use the service Medium, which I have always used to publish my literary output and which runs my German blog einGeek? What is the sudden reason to change this strategy?

So far I have never really paid attention (maybe out of miserliness?) to the fact that if I rely solely on a free service like Medium, in fact I give up all my control over the content. By publishing on Medium you retain the rights to the texts, but nevertheless Medium can make the decision to discontinue the service overnight. If this happened, all my writings would be gone overnight. Poof. Thousands of hours of effort, pondering and typing into the keyboard lost. Just like that.

Furthermore, one is also helplessly subject to the other decisions of Medium. If they want to change the design, it will be changed. You just don’t have a chance to do anything about it. If they suddenly want money for others to discover your articles, you have to pay. You just have to do everything Medium wants. Quasi-dictatorship.

That’s why I’ve been looking for some time now for a way to become a bit more independent. No, I don’t want to turn my back on Medium and ignore all the positive reasons it has to publish on this site. I just want something like a backup plan. An alternative, if Medium will no longer be what it once was. If there are good reasons to leave this platform once and for all.

This is the real reason why I’m starting with this new blog right now (is the name really appropriate?). But there is another practical reason.

I also have the blog appydroid. I have just revived appydroid. About two years ago I wrote several articles on appydroid almost non-stop every day. About what? About Android. App updates, app reviews and some other topics. My heart beat for it. But then at some point due to server problems, school etc. I had to put this project aside more or less and dedicate myself to other things.

But now appydroid is alive again. appydroid uses the blogging engine Ghost like this blog here. I like Ghost much better compared to WordPress (which I used for appydroid in the past) because it’s not overloaded with useless functions that you don’t need for blogging anyway. Ghost is more like you can install it and start writing almost immediately.

However, Ghost is written in NodeJS and the whole thing is supported by my previous hoster (the company that runs the server for my homepage) but the whole thing doesn’t run optimally. The page took too long to load and with every second longer there are more people closing the browser before it is finished loading.

That’s why I’ve been looking for a new opportunity and I came across DigitalOcean. With DigitalOcean it is almost child’s play to set up a virtual server (VPS) in comparison to other vendors and besides, thanks to SSDs (instead of hard disks - HDDs) they are super fast.

I moved there within less than an hour appydroid and installed this blog.

How much does it cost? A maximum of $5 per month and, thanks to Referral Code and GitHub Education Pack, I received $60 free credit.

But now enough of the past, now comes the future and…

… my plan for writing articles

In the future I will do it this way, that I will either write articles here (on this blog) directly and then publish a copy on Medium. Or that I first publish an article on Medium and then a copy here.

I will also publish some things exclusively here or exclusively on Medium, because with some articles that I publish in other large publications, for example, I don’t have the right to do this here.

But don’t worry, you can bookmark this page with a bookmark and visit it more often (the loading of the page should be quite fast 😉). If you want to contact me, you can do this here.

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