Limited Medium Support

Markdown Monster has limited support for making an initial post to Medium Publications. Support is limited due to the limitations of the Medium API as you can only make a one time post to the Medium API. There's no support for editing or retrieving posts. Once an initial post was made you have to edit and manage the 'story' on the Medium Web site.

This still provides a lot of utility as you can do the bulk of article creation and content embedding in Markdown Monster and only do your editing in the online editor. You just want to try and do as much editing and cleanup before you post to Medium to avoid having to use the online editor.

Medium Preview Theme

Markdown Monster includes a Medium Preview Theme you can select while editing Medium posts, to get a preview experience that's a closer to a default Medium Web site. Of course you are not required to use that theme, it's provided merely as a convenience to those that use the default theme.

To select the them use the Status Bar Preview Theme selection dropdown on the bottom right and select Medium as the Preview Theme.

Source Code Formatting Limitations

Medium has no support for syntax coloring or code formatting in its default themes so any code snippets you post are posted as plan, non-syntax colored formatted text blocks.

Although you can post source code and it will show as plain formatted text, if you want better source code formatting you have to use embedded code snippets like snippets from Gist for example. You can use the Paste Code as Gist Addin to provide formatted code.

Here's a screen shot that demonstrates a post in MM and then pushed to Medium:

Configuration for Medium

Configuration for a Medium Weblog looks like this:

In order to publish to Medium you need to ensure you have at least one Publication active in your Medium account.

To set up a new Medium Account follow these steps:

  • Set the Weblog Type to Medium
  • Enter the Access Token using an Medium Integration Token
  • Then click the down button on the Weblog Id or Publication dropdown
  • Pick your Medium Publication to publish to
  • A publication ID will be shown in the drop down.

Getting a Medium Integration Token

For security Medium requires that you use a Medium issued integration token. You can generate a token from the Medium Settings page.

To create a Medium Integration Token:

  • Log in to your Medium Account
  • Click on your User account icon
  • Click Settings
  • Scroll to Integration Tokens
  • Enter a description for the token
  • Click Get Integration Token
  • Copy the generated token to the clipboard
  • Paste the token into the Access Token field in Weblog Configuration

If you're already logged into your Medium account, here's the direct link to the page:
https://medium.com/me/settings

Publishing to Medium

The Medium API is extremely limited and has no support for any extended features. Basically, the only thing that the client can send is the actual HTML and images, and tags.

Abstracts and Categories are ignored, so those fields are not available when publishing to Medium.

And please remember, unlike other Weblog types:

Medium publishing is a one time operation - editing is not supported through the Medium API due to forced limitations of the Medium public API.

Limited but still Useful

Although frustrating the limited Medium API support, being able to get an initial post to Medium is still very useful especially if you do a good job of editing your posts before you finalize our post and publish it to Medium for public sharing.


© West Wind Technologies, 2016-2023 • Updated: 08/20/20
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