{"id":7059,"date":"2014-03-28T02:57:18","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T07:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polarbear60.org\/randr\/?p=7059"},"modified":"2016-12-10T14:40:27","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T20:40:27","slug":"tech-stuff-medium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/tech-stuff-medium\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Stuff: Medium"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s tech stuff topic is something anyone can use — if they want a voice on the internet with no hassle.\u00a0 All you need to use it is a Twitter account.\u00a0 You don’t have to use the Twitter account, but you need one to be able to post articles on this venue, called Medium<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That’s when I decided to join in the Lift Community’s Quantified Diet Study.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Except Lift Community had other ideas.\u00a0 They have an entire active community on the Medium environment.\u00a0 I’ll take a look at it.\"\"<\/p>\n

When you go to the page, you should see something like this:\u00a0 If you click on the green button that says, “Start writing,” you’ll be prompted to log in with your Twitter account.\u00a0 I’m not too wild about those things. I prefer a separate login for each site I frequent, but okay.\u00a0 At least they didn’t insist on my Facebook account.\u00a0 That would have been a deal-breaker.<\/p>\n

Before you do that, let’s talk about what else you can do on this page.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 When you click the button, you get a very bare bones screen with minimal instruction.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 Type your title there. If you have a subtitle, type it in the space allotted.\u00a0 If you don’t have one, ignore it.\u00a0 Then, put your cursor where you see the gray “Write your story” and begin typing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s so simple it’s confusing.<\/p>\n

Your work is saved as you go.\u00a0 If you aren’t ready to publish, just leave it and come back.\u00a0 If you’ve closed the window, click the “M” and look in Drafts when you come back.\u00a0 It’s there.\u00a0 You’ll see four button in the upper right of your page while you’re working.\u00a0 “Delete,” “History,” “Share Draft,” or “Publish.”\u00a0 Delete deletes the draft completely.\u00a0 History will display the various versions you’ve been working with — maybe you want to revert to one of those.\u00a0 Share draft allows you to send a link of your work in progress to someone for comments or whatever before you publish it.\u00a0 Publish, publishes your article to Medium.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Some also have conventions to follow, so be aware of that as well.<\/p>\n

Once you publish, you can Tweet about it or send it to Facebook.\u00a0 My Tweets go to Facebook automatically, so I only have to Tweet the article.<\/p>\n

You can see my articles here. Notice I didn’t use a header photo on the first one.<\/p>\n

Why the Quantified Diet?<\/p>\n

I figured out the value of a picture after that:<\/p>\n

Overcoming Obstacles<\/p>\n

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

Photography: To Help Weight Loss<\/p>\n

These were well-received:\u00a0 28 Days Later, What Difference Did It Make?\u00a0 Muddy Mindfulness\u00a0 Beginning the Third Month of the Quantified Diet Project\u00a0 Fajitas for Two Breakthrough\u00a0 And this is my final article to date:\u00a0 Three Months of Mindful Eating<\/p>\n

This platform is nice for someone who just wants to give blogging a try without having to learn a complicated system.\u00a0 You don’t have to worry about a design or learning a complicated posting system.\u00a0 As I said, this is so easy it seems hard.\u00a0 Relax.\u00a0 Give it a try.<\/p>\n

The downside?\u00a0 The owners can shut it down at any time and everything you’ve written is gone.\u00a0 You can save your work to Evernote or some other article storage place.\u00a0 Or maybe that isn’t a concern for what you want to do.<\/p>\n

Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s tech stuff topic is something anyone can use — if they want a voice on the internet with no hassle.\u00a0 All you need to use it is a Twitter account.\u00a0 You don’t have to use the Twitter account, but you need one to be able to post articles on …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}