Migrating from thoughts and Medium to WriteFreely
Over the last few weeks, I've been migrating my short posts (kind of like Tweets without Twitter) from thoughts to this blog. At the same time, I've been migrating my article-length posts from Medium to this blog. This blog is powered by WriteFreely and hosted by Write.as.
I love thoughts so much, and I’ve praised it constantly. I’m so grateful that it’s gotten me back into writing short little blog posts, something I loved doing as a younger person but somehow lost interest in, maybe because simplicity and fun have taken a back seat in the world of blogging. At the same time, I’m now looking for features that thoughts doesn’t provide, like pagination, dedicated pages for individual posts, email signup, RSS, tags, and more. I still think thoughts is amazing, a beautifully simple blogging platform with an “old internet” feel in the very best way, and for that reason, I still wholeheartedly recommend it. I don’t recommend everyone switch to WriteFreely. It just seems like the better fit for me right now.
Medium, on the other hand, I could do without. They sometimes display giant banners above free blog posts to encourage readers to sign up for Medium, which is really annoying. I'm a paying subscriber to Medium as a reader, actually. I think that should exempt my blog from their advertising, but it doesn't. Also, their recommendation engine is horrific, and it encourages endless clickbait nonsense. I don’t want to support a company that does that, and I don’t want that perverse incentive to change my writing.
WriteFreely isn't perfect. Its Markdown parser can behave strangely, although it's not as unusual as the one used on thoughts. WriteFreely also doesn't provide search functionality, the navigational menus presented to authors are pretty confusing, and development seems very slow at this point, among other things of varying importance. But it's a much better fit for me right now. Even just having a separate page for each post is great. I'm sure that's what readers and search engines expect. By contrast, thoughts shows all posts on one page and uses URL fragments to link to particular posts (e.g., https://thoughts.johnkarahalis.com/#1762540598).
WordPress was another option, of course. I have mixed feelings about it, and part of me thinks it might have been a better choice given the issues mentioned above, most importantly the slow pace of WriteFreely development. WordPress can do everything WriteFreely can do, I think, the usability is a bit better, and it's a very active project. However, it's also big, bulky, and it has a bit of a “serious” feel to it, which I fear would take some of the joy out of writing. For whatever WriteFreely lacks, it's elegant and fun. Perhaps I'll migrate to WordPress some day when the tradeoffs become worthwhile (another migration, hooray!), but for now, I like WriteFreely, and I hope it continues to grow. edit (2025-12-18): Shortly after this blog post was published, I wrote about an experiment with Wordpress and how it made me appreciate WriteFreely even more.
Over the next little while, you'll see posts disappear from those places and re-appear on this blog. I expect I'll be done somewhere around the middle of January, 2026, but time will tell.