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!