Today’s tech stuff topic is something anyone can use — if they want a voice on the internet with no hassle.  All you need to use it is a Twitter account.  You don’t have to use the Twitter account, but you need one to be able to post articles on this venue, called Medium.  I do my blogging on wordpress.org on my self-hosted sites or on Blogger. I’d never heard of Medium until late December or early January.  That’s when I decided to join in the Lift Community’s Quantified Diet Study.  Since I blog regularly, I volunteered to blog about the process, thinking I’d just toss up a post every now and then on one of my sites.  Except Lift Community had other ideas.  They have an entire active community on the Medium environment.  I’ll take a look at it.

When you go to the page, you should see something like this:  If you click on the green button that says, “Start writing,” you’ll be prompted to log in with your Twitter account.  I’m not too wild about those things. I prefer a separate login for each site I frequent, but okay.  At least they didn’t insist on my Facebook account.  That would have been a deal-breaker.

Before you do that, let’s talk about what else you can do on this page.  In little white letters at the bottom, you can click on “log in,” “How do I write?,” “About Medium,” or “Find something to read.” I also want to call your attention to the “M” in the upper left corner of the screen.  Clicking on the “M” will open a menu bar with options for configuring your display or your account, seeing your stats on articles you’ve published (probably the most fascinating part of the site to me), or accessing your draft articles, easily finding collections you follow, and more.

Once you’re logged in with your Twitter account, you can begin writing immediately but clicking on the “New Story” button in the upper right of your screen.  When you click the button, you get a very bare bones screen with minimal instruction.  There’s an image of an image if you want to upload a header photo — I recommend you do, and give credit to the photographer in the spot where it says you can. There’s a large gray text that reads, “Title.”  Type your title there. If you have a subtitle, type it in the space allotted.  If you don’t have one, ignore it.  Then, put your cursor where you see the gray “Write your story” and begin typing.  Simple as that. If you select text, you’ll have the opportunity to bold, italicize, make it into two types of headers, make it a blockquote, add a link, or create a note or footnote.  It’s so simple it’s confusing.

Your work is saved as you go.  If you aren’t ready to publish, just leave it and come back.  If you’ve closed the window, click the “M” and look in Drafts when you come back.  It’s there.  You’ll see four button in the upper right of your page while you’re working.  “Delete,” “History,” “Share Draft,” or “Publish.”  Delete deletes the draft completely.  History will display the various versions you’ve been working with — maybe you want to revert to one of those.  Share draft allows you to send a link of your work in progress to someone for comments or whatever before you publish it.  Publish, publishes your article to Medium.  You’ll have the opportunity to submit it to a community for consideration — this tends to get more viewers, but the communities are moderated, and you want to make sure what you’re submitting is likely to be of interest to them.  Some also have conventions to follow, so be aware of that as well.

Once you publish, you can Tweet about it or send it to Facebook.  My Tweets go to Facebook automatically, so I only have to Tweet the article.

You can see my articles here. Notice I didn’t use a header photo on the first one.

Why the Quantified Diet?

I figured out the value of a picture after that:

Overcoming Obstacles

This one got picked up by several communities (I only submitted to Lift Community) and is by far my most popular post:

Photography: To Help Weight Loss

These were well-received:  28 Days Later, What Difference Did It Make?  Muddy Mindfulness  Beginning the Third Month of the Quantified Diet Project  Fajitas for Two Breakthrough  And this is my final article to date:  Three Months of Mindful Eating

This platform is nice for someone who just wants to give blogging a try without having to learn a complicated system.  You don’t have to worry about a design or learning a complicated posting system.  As I said, this is so easy it seems hard.  Relax.  Give it a try.

The downside?  The owners can shut it down at any time and everything you’ve written is gone.  You can save your work to Evernote or some other article storage place.  Or maybe that isn’t a concern for what you want to do.

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