Convert Medium Posts To Markdown

A good craftsperson prizes good tools — Anonymous

I released M2M, a tool that converts Medium posts to Markdown. I write my essays using Medium, which is a kickass writing tool, but publish them first on my blog, and afterwards publish the same article on Medium. M2M makes this workflow easy.

You can also use M2M to easily repost your Medium articles elsewhere. It’s implemented as an extension for Google Chrome. Click to install from from Chrome Web Store. It’s security/privacy conscious, and only asks for permission to your Medium pages.

You should see an “M” icon in your toolbar after you install. Simply click on the “M” icon when you’re on any Medium article (also works in the edit view of drafts, so you can convert your drafts before publishing them). You’ll get a popup with Markdown text. Select all and and copy and paste into any tool that accepts Markdown. Here’s a 30 second demo video.

Read on for why I made this utility. Report bugs to me at ranga@curdrice.com.

Medium Rocks!

It’s a brilliant writing platform. They’ve selected just the right set of features to keep the focus on the writing, while still providing enough tools to convey the message in an interesting manner (image, tweet, and video embedding). Undo, automatic saving, and revisions are all super-useful. Your work may be seen be by large audience due to Medium’s recommendations and social features.

The Catch?

Publishing first on Medium makes it harder to promote your own site in Google and other search engines. Medium.com becomes the canonical location for your article, and your own website loses out on the lasting benefits of appearing in search engines long after an articles date of publication.

So, it’s useful to publish on Medium to get nice burst of readers when the article is freshly minted. But to harvest the long-term benefits, you want your own website to rank for the same content on search engines.

The Fix

Publish the article first on your own site, giving Google and other search engines a few days to index it. Later, post to Medium. Apparently, that’s enough of a signal to Google et al that your website is the original and hence there’s a good change that page will rank higher.

A more abstract, philosophical reason is that Medium makes all links nofollow (to fight spam), which is kinda antithetical to the web ethos. So any links you create in your articles don’t really benefit the targets.

How can we use the awesome Medium editor to write our articles, while still publishing on our own sites first?

Enter M2M

I wrote a utility that converts Medium articles to Markdown. Markdown is a well-supported format that many blogging engines understand. So it should be simple to use the final output in your own blogging platform.

I write my articles in Medium just as if I would if intended to publish them directly on Medium. When I am all done writing, I use M2M to get the article in Markdown format. I paste the Markdown into my blogging engine, publish on my site, and submit the URL to Google.

After a few days, I publish from the Medium UI as usual.

Limitations

1. Images around which text flows: those are converted to regular images that take up the full page width.
2. Tweets, videos and similar embedded media. Ignored for now.
3. Image grids. They’re converted to multiple images one below the other.

Good luck!