This is the correct answer. For some reason, the top-voted comment is some nonsense about Git's branching, which was never something I've desired or every found useful in a decade of rigorous daily use with both. To the contrary, git's branching model still trips me up all the time, specifically when I want to do things like list all the commits in the branch.
Basically the problem is that unlike Mercurial branches which are actually branches while git branches are just a pointer to a particular commit. That pointer has no knowledge about what other commits are in the branch and the pointer can be moved anywhere across the tree (even to unrelated commits) with ease. Apart from the reflog, it's basically not possible to ask about the set of commits in the branch. The best you can do is never ever move the branch pointer except forward and make a note of the branch that your branch branched off of so you can do things like `git diff my-branch..parent-branch` (`hg diff -b my-branch` iirc). And this is just one of dozens of git warts.
I use Medium sporadically, and I think it's a good platform to use if you don't already have an audience, since it's easy to repost to larger publications and gain distribution.
Once you gain an audience, or if you already have one, then using an open source platform is the way to go.
WordPress is probably the best choice, since the ecosystem is just so much larger than anything else out there. I would really suggest finding a managed service over deploying it on an ec2 instance or something. Security is a constant battle on WordPress sites, and it's just better to have someone else deal with that.
If you don't care about distribution or growing an audience and are just blogging for fun, then something like Hugo might be a good choice.
If it helps, I’ve used Redux in a couple production apps and loved it. Boilerplate can be a bit tedious at times, but in exchange you get a lot of sanity and clarity in your code.
There has certainly been a lot of anti-vaping money backing ballot measures like the recent one in SF. I’ve been meaning to look into who is actually funding this. The tobacco companies seem to be on board with the trend and many are manufacturing their own devices. What’s bad for Juul would likely be bad for them too.
I can say from experience that an Instagrammer with 100k followers is unlikely to get anything near $2700 to post a photo. This was probably true several years ago, but these days the number is closer to $1000.
The ROI used to be that good, and then the market became crowded and the consumers became more savvy.
Now the ROI is worse, the advertisers start lowballing, and the content creators keep accepting (because rent is due and nobody else is offering any higher, sooooo)
This is spot on. It's just like any other marketing tactic - it works well until everyone else starts doing it.
As for the pricing of posts, the lowballing is getting more and more dramatic, because there are many more "influencers" now. The only brands really shelling out are large corporations with large budgets looking for something very specific. Smaller brands can just reach out to a bunch of influencers offering only product in exchange for a post, and someone will say yes.
Basically the same way SV companies come up with their valuation. You ask someone to pay $1000, and if they say yes... that's the price. Now every company who asks the price is told $1000.
It's the agencies sitting in between brands and influencers who are that good. They're incredible salespeople, and since they get paid a percentage of the spend, it's in their interest to have as many influencers who can post, so they can sell as many posts as a brand can be talked into.
When you have to use design principles to argue against the fact that many people think the "poorly designed" poster looks better, your principles have failed you, and maybe it's time to reconsider them.
There is no reasonable way to argue that the "before" poster is better designed. Centered text, contact information typeset as loudly as the rest of the content, mixing uppercase and boldface for section headers, a URL bleeding into the margins.
Neither design is good, but the "before" design communicates nothing clearly, while the "after" at least rewards a glance with the knowledge that:
* there is a regular class schedule
* you can come visit without an appointment
That information is also in the "before" design, but you have to read carefully to find it.
The most important thing to understand design is that a good design has clear goals. The critiques I'm reading of the "after" design seem to be based on the idea that all the information in the poster is equally relevant; they ignore the goals of the poster --- by necessity, since the "before" poster objectively doesn't have a goal, which it deliberately demonstrates by not having any hierarchy.
If you don't care about the goals of the poster, you can just go with whether you like or dislike the thin black rules dividing it up, or whether you like big text or little text. But you're missing the point if you do that.
> There is no reasonable way to argue that the "before" poster is better designed.
Yes there is. More people think the left design is better, ergo it is reasonable to assume it is a better design.
The failure of the right design, and why people don't like it, even though the one on the left is a visual cacophony, is that it doesn't bring out the information people are interested in. It uses design principles to box them into an information hierarchy so you can find them, but that's an extra step it's introducing. You don't have to find the key information point in the left one because they're presented up front. A quick linear skim and you've gotten everything you need. You'll notice that all of the important information a person needs to know is visually distinct from the rest of the poster and larger on the left.
Here's what I need to know: what is this about? (Akido), when are classes I (a beginner) can take, how can I get in contact with this place?
The left answers this with a quick scan, the fact that the leading on the words "Beginner Class" is worse on the left is irrelevant, the information, which is all I want, is more prominent. It doesn't matter that there's a section called "Come Visit" on the right, I know what an address, phone number and URL look like on sight (automatically and instantly) and my context know that they'll be about the Akido school, and the left poster does a better job and making those elements larger, easier to read and more visually distinct.
In fact, I can recognize what a phone number looks like before I can even register what all the numbers that compose that phone number are. I can even find the number on the left poster in my peripheral vision somewhere around where my eye hits "Regular Classes" on the left. I have to both find the "Come Visit" section and get about halfway through it on the right poster before I can even register that there's a phone number on the poster at all!
To use an analogy, the left poster is a bright direction sign on a dark street. Immediately noticeable, visually distinct, clear call to action "come here to Akido!". The right poster is a library, well organized, guaranteed to contain key elements, but you need to navigate the organizational scheme to get what you want out of it.
The right design doesn't present information, it organizes it, and that's a failure for an advertisement poster.
