There's room for improvement but it works pretty well
I've been writing articles on WordPress blogs since 2005, but at the beginning of this year, I started publishing my articles to Medium.
I still publish everything to a WordPress blog first, though. I still see the canonical link advantage in the search engines as important.
This doesn't mean that I want the process of publishing in two places to be clunky. Who likes clunky?
Here's how I do it.
I write the article in Obsidian
Obsidian is a freely available Markdown editor that I've become pretty enamored with.
I keep my ideas and drafts in an Obsidian vault, and work from there.
I can include subheadings and hyperlinks right in the article using standard Markdown syntax. Same with numbered and bulleted lists.
I haven't played with how to deal with images in the article yet, but that's an edge case for me at the moment.
I've installed an Obsidian community plugin called From Templates that lets me insert swaths of text in articles. I use this for the call to action at the bottom of the article.
I copy-paste the entire article into a WordPress post
Once the article is done in Obsidian, I go into the WordPress dashboard of one of my blogs and create a new post.
I then go to the article in Obsidian and copy the entire article (CTRL-A then CTRL-C).
I then go to the WordPress post and paste it all in there (CTRL-V).
The beautiful part of this is that the headings, the lists, and the hyperlinks all just work without additional formatting. That part impressed me the first time I tried it.
I add a header image, other images, and WordPress metadata
Now that the bulk of the article is in WordPress, I insert any other images in the text that were missing.
I then select a header image (usually from Pexels or Unsplash) and upload that to my media library in WordPress.
Finally, I set up the WordPress metadata like category, tags, post slug, and excerpt.
I enter the title of the post. (That doesn't copy over.)
I give the article a once-over and correct anything that Grammarly found in the post.
Then I publish!
I then copy-paste the entire article from there into Medium
Once the article is published on WordPress, I go back to the Edit Post screen in WordPress.
I hop onto Medium and click the Write button to bring up a blank composition page.
I go back to the WordPress Edit Post screen and copy everything from that screen (with CTRL-A and CTRL-C).
I then paste (CTRL-V) the entire article into the Medium composition screen. Again, the formatting carries over like magic. It's beautiful! What's more, if I had inserted pictures in the WordPress post, they'll carry over to Medium just fine!
I re-insert the header image and title, and add the canonical link and other metadata
Because of the theme I use in WordPress, the header image doesn't appear on the edit screen for me to copy, so I re-import that into Medium. I also re-insert the title of the article, and create a subtitle.
I then add the canonical link information, which is the URL to my blog which I just published minutes earlier. (I click the three dots, go to More Settings, and Advanced Settings.)
I'll also add five categories that describe the content of the article while I'm on the More Settings screen.
Then, I publish there!
And that's pretty much it
It's a few extra steps to publish an article on a blog first before publishing on Medium, but not that many. For me, the extra control over the ownership of my content is worth the extra steps.
Thanks for reading!
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(Header Photo by cottonbro studio)