Surprising absolutely no one I have struggled for months with this decision about where and how to host my blog.
I had seriously considered five main options: Notion, Medium, Wordpress, Statamic and something more custom using MDX and Next.js. The appeal of the more custom options like statamic and Next.js were clear. With those platforms I could do whatever I wanted, but as has been said millions of times, with great power comes great responsibility. I know myself well enough to know I’d spend way more time sweating the technology and the design than I ever did actually writing.
With the hosted options I struggled with Notion and Medium because neither one really seemed like it was actually what I was looking for. Medium seemed exactly what I was looking for in a way as it brought an audience for my writing and limited my options for customization. But it feels like writing for a publication not writing for myself. Maybe better to consider cross posting a few things there once in a while, but that shouldn’t be my home on the web, right?
I had been trying out Notion for a few months now and really liked the idea of posting all my writing there. With a blog powered by notion it would be all about the content, I wouldnt even be able to think about the presentation of the content really freeing me to focus on my words.
On top of that I could embed tables and even fun things like this Kanban board of other post ideas
Yay, everyone wins! But a couple of small things kept me from pulling the trigger an really committing to this format.
First off was the lack of custom domain support, I had found a few articles on how to pull it off but it felt like and very much is a hack. It’s surprising that the folks at notion haven’t added this feature yet. I worry that they dont want me using it in this way but oh well here we are. I ended up following the guidelines in this article which uses cloudflare workers to mask the domain. So its a hack but its a pretty flexible hack and there’s little that notion could really do to break this so I think I’m safe, for now. It’s hilarious to me that this article is about how to do this is actually written on Medium, instead of notion, wonder what’s thats all about.
The second one seems small but the more I use the app the more I expect it to bug me. The “block” nature of app means you can only copy and paste a single “block” at all time. In the case of a bulleted list you can only copy and past a single bullet at a time, wtf?
But whatever, I should stick with notion at least through the summer and give this writing thing a serious go. I know I have a lot to say, now I finally have a centralized place to share it.