Bye Bye (Again) Medium

My Medium membership is up for renewal on August 17th. I returned to Medium last year to share a special set of articles about my potential career pivot to freelancing. I wrote over a dozen articles on this topic, believing Medium was a suitable platform for personal and career-focused content. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Despite following all the SEO tricks, I earned only $1.64 in revenue, which I won’t receive since the minimum payout is $10. 😳 I expected my earnings to at least cover the cost of my Medium membership, but that didn’t happen. I also intended to read more content on the platform, but I didn’t. I thought I would gain more followers, but that didn’t occur either. I understand now that I need to move on1, 2.

Goodbye, Medium. It was one of my numerous experiments3. I’ll keep my account active but won’t write or share anything further.

  1. The vibe on Medium feels strange. The presence of generative AI often lingers in my mind while reading content there. ↩︎

  2. I aim to focus my creative energy on the right things; doing less often leads to a more sustainable and enjoyable journey. ↩︎

  3. Write.as, Substack were other experiments, too. ↩︎

Referring to an earlier post today, I think I know why I’m publishing less often long articles. Building each newsletter edition takes quite some time and is rather disruptive-I’m constantly on the lookout to find new and interesting stuff to put into each ephemeral scrapbook. Learning to use Elements proved to be more demanding that I thought (but it was worth it!). And more recently, maintaining my visual catalog of Liquid Glass failures also requires some dedication, thank you, Apple.

Micro.blog Question Challenge

Jim Mitchell, on his blog:

As is customary after posting my own, I’m extending the challenge to Numeric Citizen (@numericcitizen) and David Johnson (@crossingthethreshold) to answer the same questions:

Here are my answers!

  1. Why did you start a blog in the first place? It was when Apple had iWeb, part of MobileMe. It was a family thing only. iWeb died, so did my blog. Eventually, I returned to blogging on Blogger, now part of Google, while developing iPhone apps in 2009. It lasted until 2013. Then it all died. I returned to blogging in 2015, using WordPress, then migrated to Ghost and Micro.blog; both serve different purposes. The rest is history.
  2. Have you blogged on other platforms before? Yes, all in all, I experimented with iWeb, Blogger, WordPress, Micro.blog, Write.as, Substack, Medium. Am I missing one? Oh yeah, Scribble.pages! Sorry, Vincent!
  3. Why did you choose Micro.blog? Back in 2018, when it launched. Initially, I wasn’t sure about it and viewed it as an experiment (I shared some thoughts about this). I went all in during COVID. Couldn’t be happier.
  4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another application? It depends. Most of the time, I wrote on the web editor, but with recent updates to the Mac app, I do it more and more on the Mac app. Oh, MarsEdit is also one app that I use, from time to time.
  5. When do you feel most inspired to write? All the time, mainly in the mornings when my head is still pristine (can’t tell if this is something we can write!)
  6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? Most of the time, I write and then publish, especially on Micro.blog. For longer posts, I let it simmer for a while.
  7. What’s your favorite post on your blog? So hard to tell because what I write is so short. The whole thing is what I’m most proud of: having the time and the gut to think and write about anything away from big platforms, it’s something to be proud of IMO.
  8. Any future plans for your blog? Since last year, I decided to focus more on what I already have. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So, Micro.blog forever! For now. I recently launched “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website with the idea to replace another website built using Craft. 🤭

Thanks for calling me out on that, @jimmitchell ! How about @abc ? Will he catch the call?

It’s funny how I treat my online assets like my websites. I think of these like software or apps. That is why I maintain change logs for them, just like app release notes. You can find one here, and one there. It’s fun.

Is this a plain website? Is this a digital garden? Is this a landing page? No, it’s "Who Is Numeric Citizen?" A newly launched personal landing page where you can learn about him and his creative journey. Learn all the details (what, why, how) by visiting the website! I’ll meet you there.