The Medium Has the Message and My Blog Is Trying to Catch Up

I’ve really been digging the content I’ve been finding through Medium for the last few months or so. The Web is ever-evolving and to me Medium represents a new paradigm for Web publishing and content consumption. It’s sort of blogging combined with content crowd-sourcing combined with highlighting like I have on my Kindle combined with… Well, it’s unique, so it’s not really just the sum of those parts.

“Now that I’m really high I finally understand Medium.” by @arlogilbert -> I'm really getting into @medium. https://t.co/a7rBYWwkEi

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) May 24, 2015

To me, one of the best parts of Medium is the Staff Picks and Top Stories. These two categories give me solid content to read that is either vetted by the platform owners or popular with the platform readers. One of the cool things about this is that it cuts across all topic areas. I’m as likely to want to read one of Eric Elliott’s (@_ericelliott) excellent posts about JavaScript and its communities like this or this or something like When the heck did learning to code become cool? And why it sucks to be a beginner today… which are squarely in my own wheelhouse to interesting takes on Web design like Optical Adjustment – Logic vs. Designers.

But what makes it even more fun is the stuff I run across that to many people would seem sort of random. None of us is so one-dimensional that we cannot enjoy reading something completely new to us. Medium ensures that when we go off on one of those mental tangents, that it’s a higher quality one.

When I spot one of these seemingly random posts, I can see about how long it might take me to read it, so it’s clear going in if how much time I’ll need to invest. (I’m a pretty fast reader, so for me the number is usually an upper bound – YMMV.) Those times must be built up magically based on how long people really spend and the posts and seem pretty accurate to me.

The biggest thing I notice as I read posts on Medium is that I feel a need to up my own game, to write more pithy and valuable posts. Ever since I started blogging, I’ve had a little voice in my head that writes posts that come out of ordinary, every day experiences. These aren’t the “here’s a piece of code to fix a particular problem” posts, but often the softer stuff that makes the fact that the code exists have more purpose. It might have nothing to do with my professional life at all. (Maybe it’s hard to believe, but I do have a few other interests besides SharePoint.) I wish I actually spent the time to get more of those posts written.

I found an article that shows how to make your own blog a bit more “Medium-like” and I’ve added some new plugins to my blog here based on those suggestions. (See WordPressium: Creating a Medium-like Experience)

As of today, you can do a few new things on my blog…

Courtesy of Hans van Gent’s Selection Sharer plugin, you can now highlight any piece of text in one of my posts and send it as a Tweet, post it to LinkedIn, or send it in an email. (This assumes I ever say anything quotable, which I know is a huge assumption.) I would expect that he’ll add some more sharing options over time.

The Reading Time plugin adds some info on how long a post might take to read. You’ll see the estimate based on an average reading speed at the top of each post as you visit it. As you stay on the page, a little progress bar shows how much of that time has elapsed. Of course, reading a post full of code is different than just reading prose, so time will tell how useful this is. It can at least be a little game; can you beat the progress bar?

I hope that you find these two new capabilities useful. Let me know what you think!