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Four hosted WordPress solutions to move off Medium

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Medium is a blogging platform that is focused on the reader. Their focus was the interface. Clean, clutter free, focused on the content. Everyone is [mostly] uniform in look and feel. Not a bad thing, because their layout and typography is nice. It’s well thought out.

Community

There is also a social aspect of community. I’m part of the larger Medium community where they are pushing articles and suggesting other materials to read. This is a double edged sword though. They might find you, but they can also leave. Medium can also require your readers to pay before they read your content.

Pay to read

My frustration is that every time I click on a google search result and it’s a medium article, 90 percent of the time I need to login to medium and be a premium user to even read this article. It’s highly frustrating that every random person’s blog is becoming a paywall for medium. The web as we know it is eroding. This isn’t like paying for a subscription to the NY Times or Washington Post [insert your favorite publication here]. No, these are un-curated articles of varying writing quality, and now I have to pay to read them.

How to combat Medium with WordPress

Don’t start using Medium as your blogging software or channel. Use something else, anything else. I personally like to control my own destiny and own my data. Hosting is so completely cheap these days that looking for that free solution is usually going to waste more time than the hosting would cost.

4 Easy ways to setup a WordPress blog

WordPress.com account

This is probably the easiest way to get started. These are the guys that own and support the open source software wordpress. WordPress.com is the hosted solution that supports the open source side wordpress.com.

Plans start at $4 for a fully managed plan. Though an upgrade to the $8 plan is required to remove ads and you’ll get a free domain for a year.

I personally felt they were a bit limiting for the price, and I didn’t need that kind of hand holding. I was also looking for a cheap solution for my low traffic blog.

Pros

  • Easy to setup
  • From the makers of wordpress software
  • Manage everything

Cons

  • pricier than all the other options here. Though, it is fully managed.

EasyWP with Namecheap

Number one, Namecheap is a great alternative if you’re still hosting with GoDaddy. The domain management and the cleaner checkout process that doesn’t bombard you with upsells like GoDaddy does.

In addition to their registration business, they also have various products. One of them being a managed WordPress solution called EasyWP. It starts a $12 per year (for the first year). After the first year it jumps to $29, which is completely reasonable.

I’ve personally used this for this very site for about a year. I only recently moved it to LightSail from aws.

Pros

  • Really easy to setup
  • SSL Cert is automatically setup when you purchase via Namecheap
  • Inexpensive $12 for the first year, $29 each additional if paid annually
  • Good support

Cons

  • No shell access
  • Seemed sluggish at times.

DigitalOcean WordPress Droplet

This may be my favorite way of getting wordpress up and running. Their website interface is intuitive and their knowledge base is extensive and seemingly well maintained for whatever your needs.

Getting off the ground is a one click process. Pricing is simple and starts at less than $5 per month.

They also have a nice upgrade path should your blog take off.

Pros

  • Inexpensive. Less than $5
  • easy to use
  • well supported
  • everything is a docker container
  • billing is by the hour. Pay for what you use.
  • Shell access

Cons

  • data isn’t persistent. You’ll need to purchase additional storage to persist your data across container shutdowns and boot ups. (It’s not expensive, but a consideration)

LightSail from AWS

This may be the newest member of the group. I’m currently using this solution. I don’t know if I’ll stay here forever, but for now it’s nice being able to have everything in aws.

Aws is the juggernaut in the cloud space. The improvements they have been making in all areas of their cloud offerings have been moving at a break neck pace. One thing to mention here is that right now, the interface is completely separate from the aws console. Given it’s intended audience, that may be a good thing for you.

The setup was easy, and they have pre-configured instances with wordpress and wordpress multi-site. Their plans start at $3.50 per month making them the lowest of the 4 providers listed here.

Pros

  • Low pricing
  • aws quality and backbone. They are the biggest player in the game.
  • easy to setup
  • shell access
  • persistent storage built in

Cons

  • pricing for a managed db addon down the road is high. This can be worked around by just using an aws rds instance, but the control panel leads you to their more expensive solution.
  • pricing for a load balancer is higher than everyone here

Referal Links and Coupon Codes

Full Disclosure, some of these links are affiliate or referral links. I’ll receive credit or a commission if you use it.

  • Digital Ocean use this link and you’ll receive $50 to spend on Digital Ocean.
  • AWS Lightsail This isn’t an affiliate link, but right now it’s my preferred provider.
  • WordPress.com I haven’t personally used them. They allow quite a bit of hand holding and no technical experience necessary to get started though.
  • EasyWP from NameCheap This one was fully managed, they have good support. The first year is incredibly inexpensive and a good way to test the waters of blogging.

What else would you like to see here about wordpress solutions?

I recently tried every single one of these solutions except wordpress.com. Normally I wouldn’t make a suggestion that I hadn’t used before, but they are the makers of the software. It would be negligent to leave them out of this.

Create React App Linting with CI

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I really like the create-react-app built-in linting. If you work with your browser console open, you see all the warnings that you should probably remove to avoid bad react coding practices.

However, for working with those engineers that are not as cognizant about delivering warning free code, I found it hard to enforce. I basically needed to checkout their branch on every pull request and run it, or at least try to build it.

I wanted something easier. I want a failing CI test. I want a pre-commit hook. Something.

Well, here it is. Just add the following to appropriate sections of your .eslintrc and package.json files

.eslintrc

{
  "extends": "./node_modules/eslint-config-react-app/index.js" 
}

package.json

"scripts": {
   "test": "yarn lint && react-scripts test",   
   "lint": "node_modules/.bin/eslint src" 
}

Setting up Serverless

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This article is part one of a two part series. This is the setup of our project on the serverless framework.

I wanted to take advantage of going serverless and using cloud infrastructure that I don’t have to support. I don’t want to manage a server, manage a queue, nor a pub/sub system. Aws lamda, SQS, and SNS fit the bill exactly. This makes deployment and management a breeze. Development, not so much.

I found a lot of information out there. But nothing really gave me a good workflow that I wanted. I just wanted a prescribed workflow to get going and be productive. I didn’t find that, but this is what I did after reading articles, setting up aws-sam-cli, and serverless framework for a few days.

The problem.

I find it easier to solve a concrete problem rather than working abstractly. So let’s define our problem.

I have a newsletter subscribe form on my website. I want to be able to collect emails from visitors. With these emails, I want to:

  • send them to my list management for emailing
  • save them to my own database
  • attach an avatar photo from gravatar.com if it exists to their user session

I may not need all of these functions in the future, and I may want to add more. I don’t know what I’ll want to do with this data in the future. I do know that I don’t want it to be hard to add and remove functionality as I need.

Now that we have the problem, let’s break it down.

  • I need to setup an http accessible endpoint.
  • This endpoint will send an sns message to a topic I configure.
  • This topic will be subscribed to by a lambda that processes the message.
  • practically the same setup for development, staging, and production environments. If I’m going to go through the trouble of codifying my infrastructure, then I don’t want to do it twice.

Let’s create a todo list for our infrastructure.

  • setup the serverless framework
  • create an http endpoint
  • create a lambda that is triggered by the http endpoint to send an sns message
  • create a lambda to subscribe to the sns topic

Pre-requisites

  • serverless framework
  • serverless-localstack
  • serverless-offline
  • aws-sdk

I used the serverless framework for it’s concise ability to setup and orchestrate cloud resources.

Let’s start by installing serverless.

npm i -g serverless

Initialize a serverless framework project.

sls create --template aws-nodejs --path my_cool_service

Let’s setup the plugins. Change to the project directory

cd my_cool_service
sls plugin install --name serverless-offline
npm i -D serverless-localstack

For some reason I was unable to install serverless-localstack with sls plugin install command. So we’ll do it manually.

Now in your serverless.yml file, you’ll need to add the following if it’s not already there.

plugins:
  - serverless-offline
  - serverless-localstack
custom:
  serverless-offline:
    # I change the port as to not conflict with the localstack port for lambdas
    port: 5474
  serverless-localstack:
    host: http://localhost
    stages:
      - local
      - dev
    autostart: true

This is the basic setup you’ll need to get up and running. I use serverless-offline to easily setup an http endpoint that I can hit in the browser, postman, or curl for my lambdas that are triggered by http events.

Start serverless-offline with:

sls offline start

For all my other events and local mocking of sns and sqs, I’m using localstack. It’s a library that mocks a decent amount of aws services for local development.

Start and deploy localstack with

sls deploy --stage local

Any of the stages you have listed in your serverless-localstack under the custom in your serverless.yml will deploy to localstack instead of aws.

Once localstack is spun up, you can issue commands to it using the aws-cli by using the --endpoint-url switch. If I wanted to check what sns topics I have:

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns list-topics

You likely don’t want to type --endpoint-url= all day long. I recommend installing awscli-local

pip install awscli-local

# this turns
aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4575 sns list-topics

# into 
awslocal sns list-topics

Now we have our basic setup. Let’s put this to the test. Let’s start simple and just check that the lambda’s are returning properly when they’re configured to listen to http events. The serverless-offline plugin should be able to handle this for us. We can also use the provided hello world endpoint that should be defined in the serverless.yml already.

You should see an entry in the serverless.yml that looks like

functions:
  hello:
    handler: handler.hello

Let’s make that a little more useful by making it respond to http events. Edit your serverless.yml so it looks like this.

functions:
  hello:
    handler: handler.hello
    events:
      - http:
          path: hello
          method: get
          cors: true

This just says respond to http events using GET and allow CORS.

The only reason we need to restart the serverless-offline is when we update our serverless.yml. So let’s restart; ctrl-c the existing process you started earlier and just restart with sls offline start

Now open a browser and visit http://localhost:5574/hello

You should see a json message resembling

{
  message: 'Go Serverless v1.0! Your function executed successfully!',
  input: {...}, // should be a large object being output here
}

That’s it for the setup. AWS lambda functions are well documented as is the serverless framework for defining new functions. I encourage you to try and add your own functions for some practice. In the next post of this series, we’ll walk through creating a custom function.

Just make stuff and put it out there

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I have a lot of experience with browser extensions. I previously built an ad network that was 100% extension users. Creating them is second nature. It’s not hard to do if you have some basic javascript, html, and dom manipulation skills.

So now, whenever I encounter something about a website that is a pain point, anything at all. I tend to wonder, “can I fix this with an extension?”. I’m scratching my own itch. My best [side] projects are problems I have. They get the most love.

The latest one, WineBid.com Real Price. First, I love good wine. Many wines are hard to find. Saxum happens to be one of them. I found winebid.com through searching for a Saxum wine. Saxum no longer takes members, and their members only get a case per year. They don’t get to pick which ones, they get what they get at $100.00 per bottle. Not cheap, but not horribly expensive (for high end wine).

Now winebid.com offers a number of wines from professional and personal cellars. People bought too much, or want to make room, or are getting a divorce. Whatever the reason, they’re offering their wine for sale. It’s great. I get wine that has been aged for me at a reasonable cost. It’s usually in line with MSRP of the wine at the time of sale, only they stored it for me.

My biggest issue with the site was the listing prices. Winebid takes a 17% cut. Now, I don’t have a problem with them making money, but, it’s added on after the listing price. All the listings are for the base. You don’t get to see the total cost until you click 2-3 more times and are ready to place a bid on a particular bottle.

This makes it hard to intuitively shop with price in mind. I have to do the math on a listings page to make a decision. I don’t want to pay more for a wine that is still available. It made the process of buying and researching time consuming.

Chrome extension to the rescue. I spun up a chrome extension to update all the prices on the listings to the actual price including the 17% commission. Now, at a glance, I know how much all the wines are actually going to be. No more clicking through to view the sub-total.

Well, if I find it useful, surely someone else will. It’s not like I even need to manage the distribution. Thank you google for the chrome extension store. The nice thing is, I’ll get feedback on the extension for things I had not thought of. Free ideas!

Going through the process of publishing is a learning experience in and of itself too. It’s not just packaging the code, but if you care at all about people finding it, you need to be thoughtful about your title, description, your icons, and your feature images. All these things go into the decision process when someone chooses to install your extension for the first time. Especially when you don’t have a single review yet.

I wouldn’t let all of the promotional bits hold you up though. You can iterate quickly. I released the extension right away. Basic description, stock placeholder icons. I just wanted to get it out there. I went back and ended up releasing 4 more revisions during the weekend. Each one slightly better.

I updated the icons.The feature images were uploaded. The description was refined. I added some google analytics tracking to know how my extension is being used. I added a referral link to help monetize. You don’t have to do it all at once. These were all separate releases.

Just get something out there. Let others use it! Get feedback right away.

Don’t hold up a release because it’s not perfect. It takes time to get there. You need iterations and feedback. The products you’re probably comparing yourself to, had months or years of iterations. They started somewhere. You need to start somewhere too.

Don’t think that every single project you release will be triple A. It’s ok to have small, unpolished works. Does it serve a function? Is it useful? That’s good enough sometimes. Remember, just providing some useful functionality is really helpful to someone. People will use a product if it’s useful and not perfect.

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