Medium
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Medium is an article hosting silo.
Contents |
Features
Medium provides the following features:
- signup & login with Twitter sign-in
- post an article
- recommend (their equivalent of like) an article that you've just read
- add an article to a curated publication (requires approval from the publication owner)
- ...
- profile page (equivalent of indieweb homepage) configuration including
- icon (from Twitter)
- name (from Twitter)
- plain text bio (from Twitter)
- ...
- Custom domain support announced on 2015-03-12, in "...very limited beta" [1]
- API announced on 2015-10-07, including an official cross-post plugin for WordPress and an IFTTT channel
- ...
POSSE
It is possible to automatically (via IFTTT) and manually POSSE articles to Medium.
Automatic POSSE
From: https://medium.com/@saul/creating-medium-stories-via-rss-c2ac93d08288
- Create and sign into your Medium and IFTTT accounts
- Make sure you have a valid RSS (or possibly Atom per IFTTT's feed channel which allows it) feed containing accepted markup.
- Accepted markup for Medium’s Publishing API
- h1, h2, p, blockquote, figure (img, figcaption), b, strong, i, em, a href, hr (section break)
- Go to the Medium Channel on IFTTT, click Connect.
- Go to the RSS-to-Medium recipe and click the gray Advanced Settings link underneath the blue Add button.
- Put your feed URL into field "Paste a Feed URL here".
- Click Add button
Updates occur every 15 minutes
Manual POSSE
- Publish on your own site. Copy the permanent link's URL.
- Click on your avatar in the top right corner.
- Click on Import story.
- Paste in the URL.
- Edit the post on Medium if it took in a footer or put content in the wrong place (a header into the Medium title, for example).
Medium will automatically add an “Originally published at” note to the bottom of the post. It will also add a rel="canonical" link to the page pointing to your original post, making it so parsers know to get the post from your website when they are looking for the canonical version.
WP Plugin
Medium has released a plugin for Wordpress that will syndicate a post on your blog, to Medium, when publishing. It does not update the version on Medium if you make changes on your blog.
Request entered on the plugin support page to include rel="syndication" and "class="u-syndication" on the link added on your self-hosted post back to Medium.
IndieWeb Examples
Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith is using Medium's API to automatically post copies of articles to Medium: Syndicating to Medium.
Shane Becker
Shane Becker is manually POSSEing his articles to Medium since at least 2013-08-08 (maybe longer) e.g.:
Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks is manually POSSEing his articles to Medium since 2014-04-21, e.g.:
- http://www.kevinmarks.com/fragmentions.html (2014-04-17)
Eric Meyer
Eric Meyer manually POSSE’d a blogpost to Medium on 2015-07-29:
He described his problems with the process in a follow up post that was first published on Medium and then manually PESOSed back to his own blog, 2015-07-30:
David Mead
David Mead used the WP plugin to POSSE a blogpost to Medium on 2016-01-24:
Other Examples
Examples from people who have not specifically joined the IndieWeb.
Peter Gasston
Peter Gasston started “experimenting with x-posting to Medium” on 2015-08-07:
Exporting your data
Official Export
Official documentation. Export format is HTML of some kind (If you have done it, please expand with details!)
- go to https://medium.com/me/export
- click the export button
- wait for an email
- click the link to download a .zip file full of HTML documents
- these have a footer appended linking to the medium url that has the date exported
- they break embedded tweets and youtube videos,
- they replace external links with a redirect to a /r/?url= link that obviously doesn't work locally or on a server without you adding code
Medium-to-Markdown
Python script to output a Markdown version of a Medium post: https://github.com/markbiek/Medium-To-Markdown (If you have experience using this, please make notes here.)
API is write-only
@majelbstoat is the medium API write only? There's no docs on fetching posts, only creating them.
— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) March 22, 2016
@kevinmarks For the time being, yes. Going to approach that thoughtfully, recognising that lots of APIs have given and then taken away.
— Jamie Talbot (@majelbstoat) March 22, 2016
Issues
buggy rel-canonical implementation
If you set the rel-canonical for a post on Medium using their API, it both fails to do so correctly, and then resets (via JS?) the rel=canonical link to a medium.com URL, not what you set it to.
Downtime
- 2016-03-03 the homepage returned the HTTP 500 error below. The link "interesting to read" was to https://medium.com/top-100, which also failed intermittently.
-
Criticism
TO DO: cluster these by primary area of criticism and add subheads!
- 2010-07-10 http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2010/11/07/no-more-sharecropping
- POSSEd to Medium: https://medium.com/indieweb-thoughts/9d0e36524dbf
- 2014-05-30 Medium doesn't support footnotes
- 2014-06-09 Medium does not appear to show the full published date in the visible content. Instead there is a Open Graph Protocol meta element:
meta property="article:published_time" content="2014-01-16T08:59:18.300Z"- Example: https://medium.com/binary-times/use-your-own-product-or-die-ba3e2d738a55
- It appears that the year is displayed depending how recent the article is. A 2013 article linked above includes the year in the visible content, but as of this writing (2014-06), the example link only shows "Jan 16," because it is recently published, in the current year.
- 2015-05-21 @JosephRooks:
@kevinmarks @ev the other key difference is that #IndieWeb isn't BSing people about "openness" to create phony feel-goodsies.
- 2016-03-03 I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership.
Walled Garden / Content Farm
- 2015-07-25 Dear Medium: Please stop hurting the web by Avdi Grimm
- 2015-05-21 The Web is the network by Kevin Marks
- 2013-07-08 The Problem With Medium: A Shiny Content Farm is Still a Content Farm by Andrea Phillips
Promoting App over Web
- 2015-09-01 Feeling Like An Unwelcome Guest on medium.com by Peter Gasston
Other
- https://medium.com/surveillance-state/19a5db211e47 (currently 410s - anyone have an archive?)
- 2014-07-23 Medium rolls out New Editor Features, marginalia comments are full of disappointment and criticism
- "We wanted to be writers. you made us into designers." [2] (currently 410s - anyone have an archive?)
- 2013-07-10 https://twitter.com/t/status/355069622325747713 (these links
Tantek Çelik posted are already included here)
Articles
- Why I Left Medium by Kenneth Reitz
