I’m done with blog platforms. Moving to Medium!

Over the years, I’ve tried to maintain some kind of consistency when it came to penning my thoughts professionally.

Besides from the finite resource of time, the one hurdle that always holds me back is the effort I need to go through to publish a post. The writing part is usually done in a simple Markdown-compatible editor on my Mac, and that’s usually a breeze (on the condition I don’t get writer’s block!)

Many moons ago, I had to work with custom-designed sites. This eventually strained my patience to breaking-point, and led me to research alternatives in an age where different blogging platforms started popping-up.

Squarespace seemed to fit the bill. As the web publishing property form began to evolve and mature into something quite different, I decided on an overall redesign. While appreciating the tools and methods available to me, I still had to work around the established functionalities, specifically with formatting text and image content, leading to much time lost because of endless tweaking.

Then came WordPress, for which I had a slightly-longer relationship with. Many blogs/sites I followed were using it, while at the same time I saw variations of themes that I liked. Currently, I’m still using it for one of my sites, UXmilk.com, but have decided not to renew my subscriptions and possibly get rid of it altogether (like my Squarespace experience, it just didn’t work for, or with, me).

Heck, I even tried Jekyll, a Github-based blogging system. It was simpler in terms of implementation (once everything was set up) and I shied away from using images, choosing a theme that had a primary focus on text-based presentation. But upkeep and maintenance required a bit of work, and at times involving Linux-based command-line operations. Five years ago, I may have still been open to that sort of fun…

Problem: I just want to write, and have my work simply and elegantly presented, in a minimalistic way.

So that’s…
write → copy-and-paste → quick-edit → publish!

That’s all I want.

Really.

I’ve always appreciated Medium for its clean design, impressive use of typefaces, and the extremely-readable (and digestible) presentation of stories.

It wasn’t until recently that I took a closer look at the offerings and limitations, and decided that “I can work with this!” for the sake of simplifying workflow in the long run.

One of the biggest obstacles was migrating my existing posts to Medium. The “import a story” feature was useful, but my biggest concern was the inability to backdate the posts. I thought about this for a while, and ultimately decided to migrate only selected posts as “new” stories, while maintaining the time/date order in which they were originally published.

Given the above precondition, I needed a way to point out the migrated posts to the reader. The one and only practical way to do this was to use the “subtitle” field, which can be filled in just before a post/story is published on Medium.

For the sake of clarity, each post had a subtitle of such…

“This is a re-post of the original, which appeared on thatisso.me on <day> <month> <year>.”

…which, in my mind, makes the best sense given the circumstances.

As for everything else, so far, it has been a breeze!

For thatisso.me, I spent the greater part of one afternoon plus early evening manually migrating a total of 22 posts over, properly formatting them and preserving all links/URLs and virtual embeds (for example, Twitter tweets). Although there were no images used for any of the posts, having to re-import these wouldn’t have been too troublesome thanks to the way Medium handles them — a strength in the design of the publishing platform.

Subsequent to this post, I shall be flipping the switch on the migrated content, from “unlisted” to “public”. During this time, I’m expecting my followers’ timelines to be flooded with their listings — my apologies in advance for the unwanted spam, as there’s nothing that I can do (other than to maintain their “unlist” status, which wouldn’t work) to prevent this situation.

Hopefully, after this little hiccup I’ll be causing soon, things will return to smooth sailing again.

There’s much potential for Medium to bloom into a real writer’s network. This was also one reason as to why I decided to make the switch.

Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.