How do I set up a blog
As requested above, I have been trying to find a good way to reuse the articles I have written on Medium (https://medium.com/@JasperKense) for my own landing page (https://www.qanda.design) but I have not find any good solution so far. How can I leverage the success of the blog for my own product?
What setup/CMS are you recommending or using?
I would love to hear some experiences on this topic!
To set up a blog, follow these steps:
Is this a chatgpt reply? It feels like a chatgpt reply.
Personally I use Notion as a CMS and publish to my blog using Next JS.
Oh thats a great idea! but do you use Programmic SEO for your blogs?
So how would that work? What is programmic SEO?
I have never really dived into NextJS, but would it function as a CMS framework? Or do you read the data from Notion into a blog frontend using Next?
Hey Jasper,
I’m using the CMS framework I built called Elegant.
You can have a fully built Next.js powered blog site within a couple minutes, and it’s basically free to host.
Is this the solution you may have been looking for?
https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli
https://www.elegantframework.com/
Hi Brandon, pretty great stuff, I am seriously considering using this. I do have a couple of questions; Can this live next to my existing app. I am assuming since it is an NPM package. And how do you think serving this on a seperate link (blog.qanda.design, full website is www.qanda.design) might impact my SEO?
I would love to hear your ideas on this, thanks!
Thank you for the feedback! That is awesome to hear! We would love the support 😊
Elegant is built on top of Next.js, and uses a number of concepts from Vercel's example projects to create a near perfect web app.
To answer your question, Yes!
It can live next to your existing app, or you can even work to migrate them together into a single project if the existing code is in React.
The idea behind Elegant is to give every day people like us the ability to easily spin up a beautiful and complete website like Stripe.com, in just a few minutes.
You can start out and serve it out of a sub-domain, and then set all your domains together using a canonical meta tag. Google and the other spiders will pick up the meta tags and associate all of your domains together.
What do you think?
Hi Brandon,
Good stuff. I finally got to the point above. I am currently trying Elegant. Any chance I can scrape my existing Medium articles and put them in Markdown format?
This is a really great feature suggestion by the way, and I'll make sure to write it down and get it into our development pipeline : )
Hi Brandon, any updates on this? Would love to use Elegant but I really dont have time to customize everything. If I can easily convert Medium that would mean a great deal. Also, is there an example repo for Meidum?
Hey Jasper, sorry for the delay!
I have made a ton of progress on Elegant, and I could help you get launched if you would like.
Just let me know :)
Hey Jasper, that is awesome to hear that you are trying out Elegant!
I'd love to hear any of your honest feedback, good or bad.
As for scraping your existing articles, I found a few different ways people have done this online:
https://towardsdatascience.com/converting-medium-posts-to-markdown-for-your-blog-5d6830408467
https://macropus.medium.com/export-your-medium-posts-to-markdown-b5ccc8cb0050
As a senior SaaS founder, I understand the importance of leveraging your existing content to promote your own product. Reusing articles from Medium on your landing page can be a great way to showcase your expertise and drive traffic to your product.
One approach you can consider is to manually copy and paste the content from your Medium articles onto your landing page. While this method requires some effort, it allows you to have full control over the formatting and presentation of the content. You can customize it to align with your landing page's design and branding. However, keep in mind that this approach may require regular updates if you make changes or additions to your Medium articles.
Another option is to use a content management system (CMS) that allows you to import or embed your Medium articles onto your landing page. WordPress, for example, offers plugins like "Medium to WordPress" or "EmbedPress" that can help you import your Medium articles into your WordPress website. This way, you can maintain the content on Medium while displaying it on your landing page. However, you might need to ensure that the CMS and plugins you choose are compatible with your specific landing page setup.
Additionally, you could consider creating summaries or excerpts of your Medium articles on your landing page and linking to the full articles on Medium. This approach allows you to drive traffic back to your Medium profile, where readers can explore your other articles and potentially discover your product through your Medium bio or links :)
Thank you for the great advice. I am thinking about starting to pay for Medium to have my own domain for my articles. In theory that should backlink the traffic to my product, and hopefully drive traffic. What are your thoughts on this approach?
Wordpress works really well for this. Plus the ecosystem is well-established with plugins for anything.
Webflow or Framer sites work well, too.
Plenty of templates can be bought for any one of these solutions.
If you can code, you could give https://astro.build/ a try. I'm not affiliated, but it has me captivated and I'm building my new portfolio with it.
Could I launch that with my react app? Can those exist next to each other. Looks interesting, definitely something to use for portfolio projects
I'm a designer, so no idea how that works with your particular tech stack. 🙃I just know CSS and enough react/js to get by.
I self use Next.js and so far it works fine
I'd suggest looking into the tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog template.
Personally, I struggled to find a CMS that really hit the mark for me. I just edit the files locally and push it to GitHub to trigger a new deployment on Vercel on every new post.
That seems quite cumbersome but so far one of the only solutions I found. I would like to make sure that it looks similar but to Medium but is still customizable. I seems like nothing really fits without adding loads of frameworks to my stack. I am using bootstrap and react, but am beginning to realize more and more that tailwind is a bigger solver than plain bootstrap...
Yes, I don't really like working with Tailwind and would much rather use something like Chakra or MUI, but since the template is really packed with features, I just made some changes to the theme and I don't worry about TW so much.
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