Hello Worl… Hello Medium!

I’ve been a reader of medium a while. I noticed I could start sharing thoughts, ideas and tips. This is my “just do it”. But with a bonus! Two different ways to publish a Hello World.

1. Medium writing 101: the online editor

To start, let’s review the simple formatting menu: I generated a gif recording of how it works. You can see in action regular formatting (bold, italics), link embedding, (sub)titles options, quoting options, and the private notes.

The formatting options of the online editor.

To complement, I also recorded the left contextual menu for adding media content: here you can see the options for how to add images from your computer (all the recorded gifs were added in this story using this option), adding from Unsplash, adding video, adding embed (tweets for example), and finally adding the section part divider.

The embedding options of the online editor

This is the tweet I showed how to insert in the previous recording

2. Medium writing for advanced users: markdown

If these tools are somewhat simple for you, you can provide a previously written article on markdown, and inserting it directly. Your best friend in this case is gist, and you just need to create the content:

Creating gist with markdown for inserting in medium

After you have your gist, you have two options:

1. you can insert directly in a story, by using the add embed option (remember the previous tweet?) in these case you achieve something like this:

This content lives in my gist

this is how I added the previous block:

Embedding a gist in medium

2. the second option is to import a story: in this case, you are going to generate a separate story, with the previous content. You can check the result here, and this is how it can be done (using the previous gist)

Import a story… from gist !

Remarks on using markdown:

• if you embed the gist, you can edit the content, and it will be updated here on medium
• some things just do work differently: notice the superscript for googol in my example (compare the first embed, and the imported story)
• when you import a story from a gist, you must do some cleaning of the imported content (which I think is ok, depending on how long is your story)
• I strongly recommend you to check this article, where better options are explained in the case you want to work with (programming) code in medium

Oh, and maybe you are going to be interested on how I recorded my screen to a gif: I use Kap.