In 2017, we started writing blog posts in a Medium publication. Medium appeared to be a simple, clean and reader-focused host for writers.

At the beginning it felt like a good choice.

They supported rich formatting, great image embedding, easy to use editor, RSS and custom domains.

What’s wrong with Medium

Soon after we decided to use the platform, Medium started getting more aggressive towards readers.

It was no longer possible to create an account with an email address, instead a third-party social network login was required. Now it appears the email registration was restored.

Readers who were not signed in, were shown a modal popup asking them to create an account.

Medium has also gotten aggressive with their new monetized platform. Stories are now defaulting to be behind their paywall. While this might be useful for those who seek to earn money from their content, the paywall actively reduces the number of people that will read those stories, as it restricts it to paying members.

A new blog

In the past we never blogged much about Liri, but as progress is made we want to update more frequently our publication.

We want a blog that is read by all people for free and respect their privacy.

Since the web site is already made with Jekyll, we are familiar with it.

The blog code is here and it’s published with GitHub Pages.

This is a nice opportunity to use the new Material Design Components, that replace the older Material Design Lite that is still used by our web site.

What you can find now, is just a MVP. In order to start posting to this blog the bare minimum had to be ready.

The layout and styles will be improved upon as we go along.

In the future Material Design Components will be used with the web site as well.