Monday, December 16, 2013

Medium is Great for Writing

Matt Yglesias:

Everything changed for me over the weekend when I took the time to write a blog post on Medium. Or to write a Medium? To medium? Verbing is important, and I'm not sure Medium has it down. What they do have down is writing stuff. This is, by far, the best tool for simply writing that I've seen. You type, you edit, you format, you toss some images or headers in. It's really nice. I came away from writing the post wanting to proclaim Medium the greatest CMS (that means "content management system" if you're not in the business) in the world. But that's actually wrong. The genius of using Medium as a writer is that it isn't a content management system. It's a writing tool that has a "publish" button and a "share" button. But precisely because it isn't taked with a lot of difficult content management problems, it focuses very effectively on being a text editor.

I'd been becoming more and more conscious of how terrible everything I'd been trying lately for writing, mostly but not entirely web-based editors, was just terrible. Just cutting and pasting from one window into another is somehow a nightmare in 2013. Part of the reason Medium is nice is because the task is so constrained, but it is very nice for writing and posting mid-length pieces online.

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