We just launched Developer News. Here's how you can use it

Update August 13, 2019: I’ve written a detailed article that lays out our vision for Developer News here.

In 2015, the freeCodeCamp community changed our blogging tool from Blogger to Medium.

Medium was a convenient tool for blogging, but the community has outgrown it. So now we’ve switched to a self-hosted open source blogging tool called Ghost.

Instead of publishing community articles on our old medium.freecodecamp.org subdomain, we’re publishing them on our new www.freecodecamp.org/news/ subdirectory, which we’re calling Developer News.

The freeCodeCamp team has been publishing articles on Developer News for the past year, and we’re excited to now open it up to other contributors in the freeCodeCamp community.

Here are some immediate benefits to you as an contributor:

Improvement #1: A cleaner, faster experience

According to Google’s own Lighthouse tool, Developer News is significantly faster than Medium.

Developer News is also more accessible, and more SEO-friendly.

And we’re steadily working to squeeze out even more optimizations.

Improvement #2: Better Analytics

As a published author, we’ll give you full access to the Developer News Google Analytics data for your articles.

You can see exactly how many people are reading your articles, for how long, where in the world your readers are located, and how they’re discovering your articles. And you can do all this in real time.

Improvement #3: A lot more readers

Our NGINX logs during a typical weekday morning. And yes - that is 2,816 people using freeCodeCamp all at the same time - more than half of whom were reading Developer News at that moment.

Developer News has better SEO, faster page loads, and a simpler user experience.

It also has Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which means lightning fast page loads, even on a bad mobile connection.

There are no reader accounts. There are no prompts to “sign in” or to “pay to get around this paywall.”

All of these benefits together mean a better reading experience for your readers, and ultimately, more readers.

Improvement #4: You can write using Markdown

You can now write using GitHub-flavored Markdown, and Developer News will convert it into rich text.

Improvement #5: Built-in Syntax Highlighting

Instead of having to embed GitHub gists or screenshots of your IDE, Developer News offers syntax highlighting for most major programming languages.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I submit my articles?

Our Style Guide has more information on this.

Will you show stats on articles - like how many times it has been viewed?

Yes. We are working on a way to make these data public. For now only published authors can see these through Google Analytics.

Thanks, and happy coding!

124 Likes

This is wonderful. I’m looking forward to checking out the new platform!

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Great news! This news makes me want to be a writer on freeCodeCamp news!

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Very cool! The lighthouse metrics are impressive! Accessibility is looking awesome!! :vulcan_salute:

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We’d love to have you, Phillip. You and I have already talked a bit and I’m excited to get you involved.

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Great news! Hate Medium with all the intrusive login popups, huge top and bottom bars and the whole paywall thing.

The only thing needs an urgent improve is the code snippet inside articles, one line only code is hard to read.

All the best!

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Thanks! We’re working on fixing that as quickly as possible.

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Great news, as a new member I’m pretty happy things have been consolidated here as I was considering joining Medium because of FCC, now I won’t need to :+1:

7 Likes

This is fantastic news! Medium’s been taking a lot of criticism lately and I think FCC could stand just fine on its own.

Congratulations @QuincyLarson! :raised_hands:t5:

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Wow oh, thanks for this bravery moved, FCC has being of great help to me as an inspiration developer from Warri City Nigeria. I would love to start writing.

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Thanks for your support, Jordan. And it’s great to have you back here on the forum. I’m glad you’re sticking with it and still pushing forward with your skills.

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Awesome job! :fire:

Really cool to see the community breaking free from Medium and developing this standalone platform. This, along with the shift of the study groups off of Facebook to the forum, I believe really helps to build the brand, platform, and community as a whole!

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This article is incomplete, it would be great if you could fix it.

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Hi @QuincyLarson, exciting move!

I’d like to have access to my previous articles, as I’m sure most would. Is there a process for gaining access, or will you be contacting writers to arrange this?

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Hey @JacksonBates you will also be able to re-map your articles to your own username.

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@QuincyLarson Thanks, and congratulations! Can’t wait to submit my next article on freeCodeCamp News!!

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Thanks for filling out the form. I just sent you an email. I’m looking forward to hopping on a call with you soon and helping fix any broken links.

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Finally! One of my greatest gripe on Medium is the paywall and freeCodeCamp’s content is one of my largest reading list from it. Glad you took the move!

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@QuincyLarson Just noticed that some of my articles on freeCodeCamp News are missing the Github gists too. I’ve filled the form, hoping that it gets sorted out! Also, is it possible to retain the same username that I use on the medium account?

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Hi @QuincyLarson, I’m a bit upset of this change, I have few articles on the FCC medium publication and they have been moved to this new platform without my knowledge and agreement. That would have been nice to have a heads up :confused: How long we will need to wait to get access to our articles if I want to edit them?

Thanks

1 Like