Experimenting with Medium

2016-05-15 2 min read

    Despite my aversion to walled gardens and platforms I’ve seen a ton of people make the switch to Medium. Within the past month I’ve seen a variety of bloggers move over to Medium, both big and small: Mark Suster, Semil Shah, Andrew Parker, and a former coworker, Dillon Forrest. I’m still not convinced that Medium is for me but it definitely feels as if it’s at that inflection point with more and more people moving to Medium. And from what I’ve heard it does wonders for reach and promotion - something that I’ve been relying on Google search and Twitter for.

    To that end I’m going to try an experiment and start publishing on Medium (https://medium.com/@dangoldin) as well as on my primary blog. The goal is to experiment with Medium and see how much engagement it can actually drive. To start I’m going to copy some of my posts over to Medium and see how they fare.

    So far, one of the nice things about Medium is that it comes with a simple API that allows you to take either Markdown or a subset of HTML and turn into a Medium post via a quick API call. In fact, earlier today I wrote a small script that that takes the raw Jekyll markdown and posts it as a draft to Medium. It won’t work on every single post yet but for the ones that are pure markdown it works perfectly (example: the original vs on Medium).