Tag: medium

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At work I get emails about scratch. I often miss these or don’t pay enough attention. There is also a scratch blog on medium. I thought I could subscribe to that in an RSS reader. Couldn’t see a rss link so I searched for more information. Ironically the first two medium articles I found needed a paid account to read. Eventually I just pasted the link into Inoreader which did auto discovery. I also found the email archive on mailchimp and subscribed to that too.

It seems to me that it is getting harder to be a wee bit technical. Like hiding full URLs in the address bar, or making it difficult to find an episode page for a podcast to link to. No RSS link buttons or links to audio files. These changes may have been made in the name of simplification or to make pages a bit stickier but cause frustration here.

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This post is just a quick note to log a problem and its solution. It only took a wee bit of googling but might help me or someone else at a later date. It only applies to self hosted WordPress blogs.

This evening I tried to log on to my blog only to be met with a blank screen. I tried my DS106 blog and that was fine so it didn’t look like the first google suggestion about php being out of memory. Next suggestion was .htaccess corruptions, so I opened fetch and had a look at the file, looked pretty much the same as I recall (note, keep better backups).

The third google suggestion pointed to plugins and suggested solutions 1. This is what I did:

Using using my ftp application (cyberduck) I edited the wp-config.php file. Changing:

define('WP_DEBUG', false); to true

Trying to load the page showed an error mentioning the medium plugin that had been updated earlier in the day. So I changed the name of the plugin folder (still in cyberduck) to medium-broken. This allowed me to log in. Checking the plugin page showed that there was another update for the plugin, crossing my fingers I updated and all was well, the renamed folder was removed and a new folder was in place.

  1. How to Fix the WordPress White Screen of Death ↩

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I’ve read a lot of interesting things on Medium over the last couple of years. It seemed to start as an online space to write longer-than tweet posts, and evolved.

I’ve never written more than a few comments and one test post on Medium before this. I’ve been excited about blogging in a Domain of One’s Own and the ideas around that and those coming from the IndieWeb. A lot of the IndieWeb technology goes a wee bit over my head but I’ve installed a bunch of plugins here and thing about it a bit.

One of the IndieWeb ideas is POSSE Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This site auto posts links to twitter and G+ as do many blogs. I can now send posts to Medium too.

Medium now have an API and there is a Medium/WordPress plugin which allows you to push blog posts to Medium. There are also Medium IFTTT recipes that will do the same thing from other blogging systems. I’ve installed the plugin here.

I don’t suppose I’ll send posts to Medium often, it seems a little too writerly for me, but it is fun to play with and think about a further extension of blogging.

The WordPress plugin attaches the Medium account to your profile, so if you have more than one person posting to a blog they all could posse to different medium accounts. There are settings for copyright and for posting links to the posts in different spaces. The API does not allow you, as of now, to update posts on Medium from your blog. There is a Meta Box on the WordPress post editor to set the status of Medium posts as you go.

medium-settings

 

Technical note: I had a bit of trouble getting  plugin to work as it uses php short echo tags and I had to do a bit of find-and-replace in the plugin files. I am not sure if that will effect many folk.

I read about this first not in medium but my RSS reader, followed through to these interesting links:

 

Update, multiple  Also published on Medium lines appear at the top of this post, I do not know why?