I’m a huge fan of Medium. I’m constantly finding amazing stories, and have recently started posting my own.
I have one issue though: I can’t write in Markdown. Of course, I think everyone should write in Markdown everywhere, especially when publishing. I also believe that every writer should own their content, which means blogging on a separate site, and cross-posting to Medium.
With that in mind, I have a fairly easy solution for anyone who is using WordPress. Here goes:
Install Markdown Plugin
Install the JP Markdown plugin for WordPress. No configuration is required. (If you have Jetpack already installed, you can just enable Markdown support under Settings > Writing > Composing.)
Install Medium Plugin
The Medium plugin for WordPress is very easy to use and works well (despite the 3.5 star reviews). To configure:
- Get an integration token from your Medium account. It’s under Settings > Integration Token (toward the bottom).
- Add the integration token to your Profile page (Users > Your Profile) in WordPress.
- Set the Default cross-post status. By default, this is set to Public which means that all blog posts will be pushed to Medium. Personally, I don’t cross-post everything, so I set this to None and then just enable it per-post. You can also use Draft if you want to push it to Medium and then tweak it before publishing, which is probably the best option considering the caveats below. Again, you can also change the cross-post status per blog post, so this is easy enough to tweak while you’re writing in WordPress.
- This is optional, but I like to set the Default cross-link status to Yes (this will automatically link your Medium post back to your blog, and v.v.), and Default follower notification to Yes (this will notify your Medium followers when the post is sent over). Both can be changed per-post as well.
That’s it. Now go to town!
A few caveats:
- Medium doesn’t seem to handle complicated Markdown very well. For example, nested lists don’t format properly. I usually work around this by splitting up sections with bold headers, or using horizontal lines. There’s a reason why you don’t see nested lists too much though — no one likes them anyway 😉
- There is an occasional issue with extra line breaks either being added or removed.
- Metadata such as subtitle, description, and tags must be set in Medium, but this is easy enough to add once the article is pushed over.
- I recommend publishing to Medium with your cross-post status set to Draft so that you can review the post and fix any formatting issues. And in general, it’s always a good idea to review your Medium post to make sure it comes across as expected.
- Once a post is published to Medium, any edits in WordPress will not get pushed over. If you make significant edits, you’ll need to either re-post in Medium, or edit there.
Overall though, it’s a huge timesaver – and of course you can now write your Medium posts in Markdown!
Also published on Medium.