I often recommend that people publish their social media content as a blog post or a GitHub gist if they don't have a blog.
Here are the reasons:
Content Resilience: No matter what happens on the social media platform, your content will remain available for everybody. Take, for example, the migration that happened with some users who left Twitter and closed their accounts. Their content is no longer easily accessible. Maybe it was archived by the Internet Archive, or maybe not.
Don't depend on a platform to reach your audience: Limiting your content sharing to any (or more) social media platform makes you dependent on it. If any issues arise with your account, such as being blocked, you will lose the ability to communicate with your audience.
Safeguard against unjust or erroneous termination or suspension of your social media account: Picture the worst-case scenario where an incident occurs and your account gets suspended. Suddenly, your content and, consequently, your voice will no longer be heard.
These reasons also apply to any website where you use a subdomain (eg: username.example.com) or path (eg: example.com/username) rather than your own domain.
What to do
Get a domain
Create a blog with your domain or find a platform that offers this feature
Ensure your blog has RSS support
When you write quality content on social media, also post it on your blog. You can do this before or after sharing on social media.
Make sure you have a backup setup for your own content
(optional) Add newsletter support so people can get your content in their email when you post something.
Optional:
I recommend you choose a blogging engine/platform where you can write your content in markdown format or at least they can export the content in markdown. This will ensure you can easily migrate between blog engines without any effort to rewrite your content
I also recommend choosing a blogging engine that will help you with some kind of automatic backup. Here I like to set up a flow that will create a commit with the markdown files in Github.
That's it. Now your content is safeguarded from any dependency on a specific platform.
Simple recommendations
Regarding the selection of a blog engine and its setup, I will share my recommendations here. However, please note that these suggestions may not necessarily suit everyone's needs.
Build everything yourself
If you want to have a different UI or your blog to look in a very specific way I recommend using Jekyll or Bridgetown.
With both options, you can directly host your blog on GitHub. See documentation here for Bridgetown and documentation here for Jekyll.
Use an existing blogging platform
If you are the kind of person (like me) that will spend days customizing their theme and then configure servers and then start building new features for a blogging platform, I suggest you choose an existing blogging platform and focus on writing.
I would look at two important features in a platform:
- If they offer a custom domain name
- If they can export my content in markdown format
Enjoyed this article?
Join my Short Ruby News newsletter for weekly Ruby updates. Also, check out my co-authored book, LintingRuby, for insights on automated code checks. For more Ruby learning resources, visit rubyandrails.info.
Top comments (1)
I learnt about Jekyll, shortly after getting my own custom blog / portfolio site up on heroku 🤦♂️
I’ve already written most of it covered with controller and even model specs. But going this approach you don’t realise how much there is to do
Sitemap stuff everything worth SEO
friendlyurl stuff for canonical paths
Likes, comments, sharing ect
The list goes on haha, it made me think weather it’s worth going down this approach. For me it was partly a learning exercise, partly to get something of my own up on the web
Nonetheless this had me thinking about migrating to something like Jekyll, after all “why reinvent the wheel”. As developers we need to use any tool necessary.