I've Been Doing a Little House Cleaning on Medium and with My Blogs

                                   Photo by Mark Hang Fung So on Unsplash

I know it’s not spring, but I’ve been doing some spring cleaning the past few days — not in my house, but on Medium and with my blogs. I have been thinking about doing it for a while, and after some hesitation, I finally did it.

For over 15 years, I have been writing and maintaining personal blogs on another platform using custom domains. Although my blogs never earned much money over the years, my stubborn pride prevented me from giving them up. As anyone who has written their own blog knows, blogging is a tough endeavor, almost always destined for failure, at least for amateurs like me.

About a year ago, I discovered that Medium writers could redirect their blogs’ custom domains to their Medium blogs. Before realizing this feature existed, I had been publishing articles on my Medium blog and then republishing them on my websites. I thought if I could point my domain to my Medium blogs, I could save some time and trouble, as well as benefit my stats on Medium and my websites.

I linked two of my oldest websites, Steveso Thinks and Stephen Sovie’s Blog, to my Medium publications of the same names. I published an article on Medium explaining what I had done and settled back to see if it made a difference.

One issue I did not realize I would have was that pointing my custom domain to Medium prevented me from doing anything with my websites. I couldn’t publish anything solely on my website. I couldn’t even access it. I was still paying yearly for my custom domains but could only publish on them through Medium.

I saw no difference in my statistics, so it made no sense to continue pointing my custom domains to Medium. I decided to return to publishing on my blogs on both platforms. But it wasn’t that easy. I managed to unlink my domains from Medium quite easily but could not access my websites.

Each of my custom domains is registered with a different web hosting site, and I have been wracking my brains out about this for two days. Since I am not familiar with the intricacies of setting up and maintaining domains, I am lost.

I can probably fix the problems with my websites if I want to spend a lot of time and effort on customer support on each one, but I have decided it’s not worth it. After careful consideration, I have decided to swallow my pride and let go of my two long-held websites with their custom domains. Instead, I have created a new blog on Blogger, Steve Sovie’s Blogs, where I can republish some of my Medium articles from my publications there. Maybe I will purchase a custom domain at a later date, but as of now, it’s not a priority.

I doubt anything I have done will affect the performance of my Medium blogs or other writing. I don’t expect my new blog to be a success. I just want another site to share my work on and to preserve the memories of my past blogging adventures. I’m never going to stop writing and I’m never going to stop trying.