I myself have left Medium and cancelled my subscription. When asked, I told them it was annoying to see the modal popup asking me to sign in every time I looked at Medium from my work computer.
The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing there has gone down (One article prominently linked was about how one needs to “ditch loyalty” to have a healthy relationship).
For my personal blog, https://samiam.org/blog, I use a homegrown CMS that makes static content I wrote using UNIX shell scripts, with a bit of Perl and PHP, about a decade ago. I updated it to use web fonts once those became viable about five years ago, and updated its color scheme based on my wife’s wishes after she passed away.
For reading stuff online, I have a subscript to the New York Times which keeps me up to date on the news; I also read articles linked to here (and I haven’t seen Hacker News link to a Medium article in a while).
I’m quite proud of it. Not only does it use 100% open source fonts for the rendering, it also renders on pretty much any browser made. The stylesheets are set up so the same HTML + CSS looks good on both desktop and mobile browsers (we use different CSS for mobile, but there’s no nonsense like m.samiam.org). The webfonts have been carefully hinted and subsetted to be of minimal size, and look good on pretty much any browser (I made sure they look good in Chrome + Windows, even on a low DPI display, which has had a lot of font rendering issues).
For example, the http → https redirect is set up so the redirect is not done in browsers which do not support Javascript (and may not support HTTPS); older versions of Internet Explorer which do not support modern TLS encryption also remain on the http website. The stylesheets do not “gracefully degrade” (in the sense I don’t try to have the site look mostly the same in antiques like IE6, IE7, or IE8), but the site is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and above and any other mainstream browser from 2010 on. It is still completely readable (albeit with a different look) in older versions of Internet Explorer and in browsers without any CSS support (and, of course, it also can be read in the Lynx text-only browser).
I have tested it in Internet Explorer 5 and above, Opera 12 (the last version to use the Presto rendering engine before they moved on to WebKit), Dillo (depending on the version, it may need to have CSS disabled), Chrome, Firefox, Safari, you name it. It can be read by pretty much any browser that exists (the Unicode will look a little strange in stuff like Mosaic from 1994, but the site is still readable).
The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing there has gone down (One article prominently linked was about how one needs to “ditch loyalty” to have a healthy relationship).
For my personal blog, https://samiam.org/blog, I use a homegrown CMS that makes static content I wrote using UNIX shell scripts, with a bit of Perl and PHP, about a decade ago. I updated it to use web fonts once those became viable about five years ago, and updated its color scheme based on my wife’s wishes after she passed away.
For reading stuff online, I have a subscript to the New York Times which keeps me up to date on the news; I also read articles linked to here (and I haven’t seen Hacker News link to a Medium article in a while).