Building What Matters

Using what you have and keeping it simple

2011-me was a little ahead of my time. It was April fools and myself and the rest of the Vimeo team had just released a new ‘feature’. We replaced the search navigation with a voice prompt. (Some) users were obviously surprised by our innovation and upon using it, users were transported to a “Rick Roll” video. They had a laugh, we had a laugh, and it was all in good fun. But who knew that speaking to machines really would be the future — a natural progression of human and computer interaction because it’s, well…simpler.

Fast-forward to my work with Maslo, where speaking with machines is the norm, and I still find myself attempting to simplify things. “I want a blog” is a phrase I’ve heard too many times at too many companies, and the recent launch of the new Maslo website was no different.

The goal was to increase SEO and organic traffic, but we wanted to avoid creating something that 1) very little will read because [the site] wouldn’t have its own community, 2) excludes an existing and popular community we already make use of for our blog content (Medium), and 3) creates more work for us when it really isn’t needed.

After experimenting with various approaches our partners at Zajno concluded with the idea to keep the Maslo blog on Medium and ingest the content into our site while also redirecting the user to the source when they click to read an article. We knew letting our Medium presence continue to exist while seamlessly integrating it with our site would be the best option for both Maslo and our community on Medium.

Now to the issue at hand: Medium has historically only offered a write-only API (though you can fetch posts via a special URL with some arguments attached, but that requires some more work and is best saved for another post). Luckily some other Medium users have run into the same issue and offered up an interesting solution. Medium does offer an RSS feed, and there is an amazingly straight-forward service out there that converts RSS feeds to REST APIs. Enter rsstojson.com.

Using this service we were able to capture our Medium account’s posts as a REST API using an endpoint rsstojson provides each integration you create. All it took now was some JavaScript to make the API call, parse the content, and lazy-load the posts into our blog page. Most of the heavy lifting came down to DOM manipulation specific to our UI, but when it was all said and done our site had a blog…without all the hassles of a blog!

The hard part about changing the world (and making good products) is avoiding the urge to do what you know and are good at, and instead become good at what is important — even if that means throwing away what’s comfortable and embracing the simple.

Maslo is more than a website, or an app, or a blog, but the embodiment of empathy within technology. As we think about how we go about building things we try to remind ourselves to put the emphasis on the people and the process. Technology for technology’s sake is useless — we could have built a brand new CMS which I’ve done too many times to count — it’s the people and the community around it (like the one at Medium) that bring it to life.

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