Focus On My Personal Website

Three years ago, I wrote about reprioritizing my blog instead of social media. I did not mention any specific reasons in that article because I only wanted to revive this blog.

Going Back to My Personal Web

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March 23, 2019

It's been a while since my last post on this website. Three years ago. It's time to dust off and start writing again. I want to challenge my self, "how if I make this blog like a social media?" I will prioritise to post anything here instead of posting in social media whether it's a short or long content.

Several years later, my decision was proven right. Why so? Now, I have reasons.

When I looked at the data for visitor visits to this blog, it turned out that most visitors came from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Visits from social media are not that big. Imagine if I only wrote on Twitter and Facebook. I'm pretty sure many of my posts might be hard to find by other people.

Several years ago, I was consistently writing on Medium. My writing got many tractions on the platform. Also, articles published on Medium were easy to find by using a search engine. Just like any other blog. Then I went for totality. I even pointed my website domain to Medium.

A few years later, there were some policy changes. Medium can no longer use a custom domain. I checked, and now they enable it again but only for Medium paid members. As a result, my writing disappeared from search engines. Even worse, my account got permanently suspended for violating their terms of service because I also promoted links to my business at that time through articles on Medium. Even though when Medium first appeared, this was not prohibited.

I feel upset. Things like that won't happen if we use our platform.

For example, let's say, Vercel (my current web hosting) decides to suspend my website. Then, I just moved to another hosting. The URL and address structure will also not change, so it will not affect search results on search engines.

This thing just happened to me. I use Revue, Twitter's newsletter service, to send newsletters to readers who subscribe to my content. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, they decided to shut down Revue at the end of 2022.

Fortunately, I only use Revue once a month to inform the published content on this blog. So, I only need to export my subscribers' email data and move it to another newsletter service. If I focus on writing only on Revue, I will feel annoyed again. Like what happened on my Medium account.

As a content creator, prioritizing our domain and website as the home of our content is the right decision. We have total control over our content. Indeed, some types of content are a bit difficult to self-hosted. Those are audio and video. It's complicated and expensive if we want to host them on our server. That's why my video content stays on YouTube.