Why My Medium Posts Look Different

Why My Medium Posts Look Different You're probably wondering why I use those horizontal colored image bars to separate my title, sections, and blockquotes. Or why I have "pointer" posts that refer to my other Medium posts. The reason is that I do my writing on my own device, and I use cascading style sheets ("CSS," i.e. I write in HTML). Here's an example of what my blog posts look like. (Don't worry, it's a link to Google's Blogger site, formerly known as Blogspot. So it's safe to use.) While Medium is an awesome platform for people to share blogs, and everyone there seems extremely friendly and helpful, it's tricky to use for an oddball like me, because I want to have my blogs on my own device, and I like the styling that I've developed. I also revise my pieces frequently. Of course I could just develop them on my own device, upload them to Blogger or some other blog site, and then import them into Medium. However, Medium supports a bare minimum of HTML constructs when importing. And there are other characteristics of importing (suggestions for Medium are in this font color, since the folks in charge of Medium's stylistic strategy appear to have a thing for green - I'm color blind so I can't match it exaclty :) ... I use CSS to control my font sizes in the (original, pre-importED) post. But after importing to Medium, the resulting Medium post has identical font sizes for everything. My headings are no longer in bigger fonts. There is nothing that I can do to prevent Medium from equalizing the size of all fonts in the results of an import. That's why I use those colored bars. Otherwise every time I revise a blog, I'd have to go back into Medium and spend a lot of time doing manual editing. As of this writing, the example I mentioned earlier has sixteen major sections and ten subsections. That's a lot of tedious manual work, and of course I might miss something in a long article like that. (One solution that would work for me is a little faux tag, like <!Medium_Header>My heading<!Medium_Header_End>. That would pass through an HTML checker like this standard one, and not interfere with posting on other blogging sites or offline viewing/revising.) And even though Medium has a block quoting mechanism, the importer doesn't seem to "like" the HTML <blockquote> tag (in other words, it just converts my blockquotes into paragraphs). So I also use image bars for the block quotes. (I grant you that Medium's internal block quoting mechanism is much more attractive, but since I've got 20 or so blockquotes to find and change in the case of that example I keep mentioning, that's a lot of tedious manual work. And of course it's easy to miss some in a piece that's over 18,000 words.) Medium's importer does "understand" italic and boldface tags, perhaps a faux blockquote tag sequence could work (see previous bullet point for an example). Medium doesn't have any way of supporting navigation within blog posts. Once again, if you view that example, you'll see that internal navigation is a pretty nifty feature. For example, you can use a link to browse to the Table of Contents at the end of every part. Then you can skip around, or just use your browser's back button to return to where you were before. Medium could help by simply automatically moving the user's imported <Div id="here_I_am"> tags and <a href="#here_I_am"> through an import just as it moves italics and boldface tags through. Medium doesn't have HTML tables, which are a fairly handy way to present data to someone. So I have to convert all my tables into images for use in my Medium posts. They don't look as nice, but that's the best I can do. If you view that example, you'll see that the table rows change color when you "hover" over them, for ease of reading. (I don't have a suggestion for Medium on this, because tables are a huge headache to implement on the GUI end. But perhaps if Medium just left the user's table commands "as is," and didn't allow tables to be edited, it might help. Clearly Medium is parsing my table commands in an imported post because it dumps the contents out in the resulting story.) Medium doesn't have stable links to imported stories. In other words, every time I do a revision, post on Blogger and import, I will get a new story link, even if I try to customize the link. That's because Medium adds a hashing suffix on all story links, here's an example: -45917e937e0f. Therefore, if I want a stable (i.e. permanent) link on Medium to a story that I'll be revising, I need another "pointer" story. If I revise and import again, I just change the link in the "pointer" story. The "pointer story" works like a detour sign which always has the same URL. Medium could help me by simply requiring that my custom links always begin with my virtual URL, https://medium.com/@rog_70728/ and just letting me put whatever I desired after the virtual URL just as it does now - so long as it's unique (and otherwise syntactically 'sane') - plus additionally omitting the hashing suffix over which I have no control. Now if all of that wasn't intricate enough, there's one more little riff in this jingle. If you try to clap for or respond to the current Medium version of on of my stories on Medium, your feedback will no longer be associated with the current version when I revise it! (Because I have no way of revising the story on Medium, except with a new import operation, unless I want to duplicate my efforts when revising. And if I import again, that means I get a new URL, right?) So, you have to put your feedback on the stable Medium URL that points to the current Medium version! (In other words, you associate your feedback with the "detour sign" that always stays in the same place. Call it graffiti if you like, or maybe street art as per Banksy ;) Of course this issue would go away if Medium allowed me to use stable URLs (as per the previous bullet point). So why the heck do I care about all this stuff - wouldn't my time be better used if I wrote on Medium and stopped being so fussy? Well, now that I've developed this approach, it doesn't take a lot more time to use it. Coding HTML comes naturally to me, and I happen to really like the cosmetics of this example. Obviously that's a matter of opinion, some purists may regard the style as too "fancy." And it's nice to have my writing on my computer, complete with all the stylistic elements. Also, I can work on my stuff even if I don't have an internet connection. And I can back it up because I have my own copy. Plus I happen to like HTML tables and internal navigation. (Internal navigation is a big plus for me, because I can quickly move between the parts of a long article when proof reading it for internal consistency.) And yes, this means that I actually have three HTML versions of each post on my device. One is customized for Medium, the other for my own offline use (or Blogger), and one is the "master." The "master" contains alternate blocks of HTML to be used for each site. For example: <!medium> This line of HTML is for Medium only. <!medium_end> <!blogger> This line of HTML is for Blogger or other sites only. <!blogger_end> Then I have some scripts that convert the "master" HTML into something which is suitable for posting on Blogger (or just reading on my machine). The Medium version has to go on Blogger first, and then be imported into Medium when I do a revision. (And of course I have to edit my "pointer" post, which is the only Medium story that has an unchanging link.) As Peter Falk would say when playing the detective character Columbo ... "just one more thing." You probably won't run into this issue unless you somehow manage to find your way to the Blogger post that I imported. (Theoretically, that shouldn't be possible unless I forget to remove the source link at the bottom of the imported story.) Remember I said that I uploaded stuff to Blogger and then imported it into Medium? (You gotta import from somewhere on the web, you can't do it from your local device. It's not an upload.) Well, it turns out that Medium doesn't let you import twice from the same URL. If you try to do that, your last version will be used instead, even if the corresponding Medium story no longer exists. I'm not sure what the rationale for that is, but it means that the Blogger URL which was used to feed the import cannot be stable either. So when I revise my stories, I always upload the version formatted for Medium into a new Blogger post. You will see warnings on my stories about this. (However there is always a stable Blogger URL that's formatted for Blogger, and a stable Medium URL that has a link to the current version on Medium, for those who prefer to read it there.) Medium could help me by simply removing the code that caches imported URLs, or at least add an option to the import process that permits me to specify that the URL be read freshly. Even better: Medium could just let me upload from my own device via a <TextArea>. Anyway I hope all of that makes sense. And yes, I know that what really matters is content. There's no point in having all those bells and whistles if you have nothing to say in the first place! But I flatter myself by thinking that I do. --raj P.S.: My e-mail: Rog AT RS-FreeWare.Org (e-mails are case-INsensitive, capitalization is just for ease of reading)