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Publishing to Medium + WordPress … and beyond
I’ve been tempted to begin writing posts on Medium.com, but hate the idea of giving up my long-time personal blog. Shifting to Medium would also put my posts in the care of a web server that I don’t control (whereas I host my own WordPress instance on my own regularly backed-up server on a domain of my own).
Medium doesn’t have an open API that helps in this regard, but every Medium author does have their own RSS feed — mine, for instance, is simply https://medium.com/feed/@jstein
(Note: Alan Levine had pointed out some problems / pitfalls with the Medium RSS feed back in Sept 2014, which Medium engineer Nick Santos has since responded to.)
Combine that with the perennially popular WordPress plugin, FeedWordPress, and you’ve got a simple syndication engine that lets you publish to both platforms in near-real-time.
There is one problem with this setup, however: The Medium RSS feed only delivers a truncated version of each post, i.e. the first paragraph plus a hyperlink to the original Medium article.
So syndicating Medium posts will not preserve your writing on another system, but it will allow you to maximize your publishing on both platforms.
That aside, I still get kindof excited every time I find an RSS feed on a site I love, because there’s so much you can do with them. In this particular case, feeding Medium into WordPress presents a variety of opportunities to extend your writing across the web. For example:
- Use any of a number of WordPress plugins to post to other social media, like Twitter.
- Leverage the WordPress channel on If This Than That (IFTTT) to trigger any number of other events.
