Make the Medium blog more discoverable on Jupyter.org

[choldgraf]

Our medium blog is the only formal channel of communication between Jupyter and the outside world. However it is not linked prominently on jupyter.org (EDIT: It is linked under News, I didn't realize this linked to the blog!), and it isn't served as a sub-folder of jupyter.org (e.g. jupyter.org/blog, instead it is blog.jupyter.org) so it doesn't benefit from the same SEO.

I think our blog is pretty important, and we should find more ways to drive attention to it. This will boost our reach, give us more leverage in communications, and connect our website with our primary means of communication.

Suggestion

I'd propose all of the following but if there are strong objections to one of them, would be fine doing only a subset.

• Rename News to Blog so that it's easier to glance (or, Blog & News so that it is more noticeable in general?)
• Add a list of the last 5 blog posts on the medium blog somewhere on the landing page
• Link the blog from our footer
• Link the blog from the community page
• Link the blog from the jupyter documentation

Inspiration

• Rust has a blog link in their header
• Julia has a blog link in their header
• Python has a latest news section on their landing page with the last 5 blog posts
• R has a blog link in the sidebar
• CNCF has blog % news
• Kubernetes has Kubernetes blog

[jasongrout]

The "News" link in the navbar at the top goes to the blog:

However I do see that the blog isn't mentioned at the bottom in the list of "follow us" channels. Should we add it there too?

[choldgraf]

Good find! I've updated the issue body with some extra steps given this new information

[jasongrout]

Since we are starting to collect stats on the website, I'd love to use this opportunity to test how effective the analytics are in our decisions on the website. I propose that we make some or all of these changes, but in maybe 2 weeks to let us collect some baseline data first.

For example, I see on the stats that we do have some people exiting jupyter.org to the blog:

[jasongrout]

It would also be interesting to look at our viewing stats on Medium to see how much blog traffic our website accounts for. I don't have access to those stats. @jupyter/media-strategy-working-group - do you have access to the medium stats for the blog?

[choldgraf]

I'd love to use this opportunity to test how effective the analytics are in our decisions on the website.
I propose that we make some or all of these changes, but in maybe 2 weeks to let us collect some baseline data first.

This is exactly the reason we should be using Plausible! I totally agree. We should use the web analytics to:

1. (in)validate experiments for how we can improve traffic in the ways we'd expect.
2. Understand which pages are most-visited and thus warrant the most attention for high-quality content/structure