I have tried writing on Medium and LinkedIn in the past. The experience was rewarding, but I could not find the fluency that I would have liked. E.g. since joining Medium in 2018, I published a grand total of 7 articles. That’s less than 2 articles a year.

Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, who goes by the mystical handle @vonderchild, I recently started experimenting with GitHub Pages. This is my 7th post on GitHub Pages in 7 days.

It’s a good start.

Granted, it is unlikely that the numbers will sustain. GitHub Pages thus far has been a release for notes taken in the past that never saw the light of day. But if early signs are anything to go by, then the signs are, at the very least, promising.

Take nothing away from the other platforms, it’s me who has been unable to find my groove on them. Each platform is fantastic in its own right and I will continue to try and find the best use for them.

Writing on GitHub Pages, I have felt a greater level of comfort and control. Some reasons that I can think of:

  • I host my content.
  • I can choose when, where or with whom to share the content.
  • I can release incrementally. There isn’t a big bang “publish” button that I have to hit.
  • I can write the content as code, on an IDE, on git. For a programmer, that is icing on a cake!
  • I can reflect back and find things with ease. It’s all in a GitHub repo. The content doesn’t disappear either with time, like on a social media site.
  • I don’t intend to charge anyone for the content, and I am not bound by the platform to do so.

While there are upsides, there too are challenges. Features that we take for granted such as stats, reactions and comments, all require a bit of coding. Nothing extravagant, but it’s still not the same as using a ready-to-go platform. This isn’t necessarily a downside if you don’t mind coding, which was also the case for me. I found it an opportunity to learn a few tools I had not used before e.g. Jekyll and GitHub Actions.

If you have struggled to write too, don’t be too hard on yourself. The cause could be many things, one of which is finding the right platform to write on. As Steve Jobs said in his famous speech in 2005:

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.

Don’t settle.