Blogging about your blog is the bloggiest blog you can blog

It turns out we’re not immune to the common web development trope of blogging about rebuilding your blog. After hosting the silverorange blog on Medium for the past few years, we’ve migrated the silverorange blog to our own self-hosted alternative.

Medium worked well for us, and its design constraints let us focus on writing. By using the blog.silverorange.com subdomain, we’re able to switch out our blog platform without disrupting the site.

The time to migrate off of Medium has come. The cross-promotions and sign-up prompts were getting to be a bit much (it was free, fair enough).

We opted to migrate our blog to a simple self-hosted system we built using Next.js. We were drawn to Next.js by the quick setup, the component-based development approach from React, and the simplicity and performance of static-site generation on the server side.

The result is light, simple, and fast. It’s so fast that we discovered Google’s Lighthouse performance auditing tool gives you fireworks if you hit 100% in all four of their measured categories:

We’ve also used the opportunity to exercise some newer front-end web practices, including CSS Grid for layout and much more visually prominent focused links for better keyboard navigation accessibility.

It’s nice to have the blog back in our own hands and not rely on the business whims, however good or bad they may be, of a platform like Medium. We’re looking forward to writing more and improving the site in other ways.

What does this mean for you? Nothing! You can keep reading at the same blog.silverorange.com address and keep subscribing to the RSS feed at blog.silverorange.com/feed.