Made

Writing Medium Tech Articles in Markdown - Yes We Can

One-click publishing? You bet.

The Struggle is Real

  1. As a developer, I love Markdown. It’s just how we roll.
  2. As a front-end guy, I dig Medium’s clean design. (Okay, maybe not so much these days…)
  3. As someone who’s getting older, I need to write things down before I forget. Bathroom breaks are dangerous.

These are all perfectly reasonable desires. But there’s a problem: Medium doesn’t support Markdown. They think it’s too geeky.

mdfk

Fine. You don’t want to support it? I’ll build it myself.

Let’s Get Building

Here’s what I wanted to achieve:

  1. A simple Markdown editor.
  2. Connect it to my Medium and GitHub accounts (for Gists).
  3. Automatically turn code blocks into proper Gist files.
  4. Don’t forget other embeds, like YouTube videos.
  5. Make all of this happen with one click.

I won’t bore you with the technical details. We’re all developers here, we know how it goes. But here are some fun facts I learned along the way:

  1. Medium’s Public API is ancient. And their legal team will sue you for using undocumented APIs, even if they don’t have authentication…
  2. PayPal’s 2019 API documentation doesn’t match the actual fields. I discovered this after happily writing twenty-something TypeScript classes.
  3. Cloud SQL is ridiculously expensive. Like, “check-your-bank-statement-for-fraud” expensive. Do your research before spinning up an instance.

Okay, enough complaining. Let’s see the results!

  1. Write some stuff in Markdown (this is using the basic example, you can find more in the Hints section on the left).
Markdown Demo
  1. Hit “Publish to Medium” (make sure you’ve connected your account).
Markdown Demo
  1. Boom! A beautiful Medium post, ready to go!
Markdown Demo

Demo video:

What’s Next?

There’s still a lot I want to do with this project. Like adding support for other Markdown editors (VSCode, JetBrains), importing from other sources, and syncing directly with repositories. But I want to see what kind of feedback I get first. What I want and what users want aren’t always the same thing.

Plus, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything myself. Now that I have this editor, it’s time to start paying off my content debt.

Oh, and I haven’t figured out the whole payment processing thing yet (still trying to figure out which service is best). If you’re interested in trying out the Writer plan, just let me know. I can hook you up directly through the database. No need to pay anything. 😉

If you’re also passionate about writing Medium tech articles in Markdown, please share this project around! I’d love to hear your feedback and learn how you’re using it. 😊

'19, Apr 21