Inspiration to move to Hashnode

I had read many articles on medium.com and dev.to. The articles published on those platforms looked slick. But on Medium, the articles were behind a paywall. So whenever the urge came for me to switch from my old drab Blog on Blogger.com, I resisted the idea and put it off.

As my day job culminates with building websites on a CMS (Content Management System), I was also tempted to roll out an open-source CMS such as Umbraco and build my own blog on it. It's easy enough. But then I would need to host the CMS and take care of upgrades. So once again, I just continued on Blogger.com.

This was until I came across my former colleague Thai Tran's Blog. I was impressed by what I saw and as I scrolled to the bottom, I came across the Hashnode tagline.

Powered by Hashnode - a blogging community for software developers.

That sounded perfect. That was way back in June 2022.

Fast forward to 17 September 2022, I had ten days of annual leave booked in and a few tasks on my to-do list. One of which was to consolidate articles across different websites where I had written as a guest, MVP or employee.

I went back to Thai's Blog and scrolled down to the footer to remind myself what he was using.

I read the hashnode.com homepage and was convinced this was the way to go. Some of the features I really liked were:

• No Ads
• No Paywall
• Map your custom domain
• Free SSL
• Markdown for authoring

What I couldn't find information on was how Hashnode was monetized or its plans for monetisation. I had to dig a bit further to figure this one out. But Hashnode's co-founder Sandeep Panda says the following in this public question to the Hashnode team.

PRO features and monetization plans: Although we have raised sufficient funds to run Hashnode, we are looking to introduce a revenue model for long term viability. We have a few ideas in mind and I'll share them in a separate post.

So I signed up for an account and started to migrate my old blog posts from Google Blogger to Hashnode. While doing that, I thought it would be good to document my journey to inspire others as as I was inspired by Thai.