After four years of publishing on Medium, FreeCodeCamp is migrating all of its articles to its own open source publishing platform, a modified version of Ghost. The platform allows approved authors to cross-post their blog articles on the new FreeCodeCamp News site for free, without any ads. “Medium was a great place to publish because…
While editing this episode, I noticed that my voice routinely goes from quiet to loud. I’m not sure why this is and suspect it has something to do with Windows 10. I apologize for the audio quality and will try to have it fixed by next week’s show. In this episode, John James Jacoby and…
In March 2017, Medium scrapped its previous ad-driven revenue model to become a publisher of premium, subscription-based content. The company launched a new $5 subscription program and gave a select group of writers and publications the ability to publish articles behind a paywall inside its network. Medium’s invitation-only Partner Program launched in August but has…
Over the past few months, reviews for Gutenberg have trended towards a love/hate relationship without much in between. To figure out why this is, Millie Macdonald and Anna Harrison of Ephox, the company behind TinyMCE, analyzed the feedback and concluded that many of the issues likely stem from timing. “In short, the nuances in the…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by David Peralty. Peralty is a prolific writer with more than 30K articles published online for various media outlets. He also co-hosted WordPress Weekly episodes 41-75 in 2009. We discuss the rise and evolution of blog networks over the years, the current state of WordPress…
The Awl, ThinkProgress, Film School Rejects, and several other publishers have moved back to WordPress after short experiments on Medium. In early 2016, Medium convinced a collection of small, independent publications to move to its platform but shortly thereafter discontinued its unsuccessful ad-driven publishing model without notifying publishers. In March 2017, Medium CEO Ev Williams…
Nearly three months after laying off a third of its staff and publicly admitting that its previous ad-based revenue model was broken, Medium has introduced a new $5 per month subscription program. The internet speculated freely about Medium’s next move after CEO Ev Williams said the company would be taking “a different, bolder approach” to…
Medium started 2017 on uncertain footing, laying off a third of its staff in January after admitting that its ad-based business model was not working. “We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming…
When the floor was opened up to users for suggestions on what they want to see included in WordPress 4.7, Mark Root-Wiley advocated for Trac ticket #27159. The three-year old ticket was created by Hugo Baeta and suggests that certain buttons in the post editor be removed in order to improve the user experience. In the initial proposal,…
I’ve used WordPress for more than seven years and I can’t think of any features it has that are innovative. I believe part of the reason is that I’ve been stuck in the WordPress bubble for so long, I haven’t been exposed to different ways of doing things. I only know the WordPress way and…
The other day, I came across a brand new WordPress plugin in beta by Richard Tape called WP Side Comments. Based on Eric Anderson’s SideComments.js to enable inline commenting, WP Side Comments adds Medium.com style inline commenting to WordPress. With this plugin installed, each paragraph can be commented on instead of all the comments being at…