The making of Medium.com

http://www.teehanlax.com/story/medium/index.html

by aquid • 13 years ago

140 62 13 years ago

arkitaip• 13 years ago

Very detailed and useful write-up about how actual design work is done in complex web app projects. Makes me actually want to use Medium.

dreamdu5t2• 13 years ago

Medium is not a complex webapp. Facebook or gmail is a complex webapp.

markdown6• 13 years ago

Medium is so simple it would be a good candidate for beginner web tutorial examples: Build a Medium clone in Rails in 4hours.

Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing because it was made by "web celebrities".

asselinpaul• 13 years ago

Wow, impressive story! Thank you

Shamiq2• 13 years ago

I'm having troubles getting the twitter blurb to load. Any recommendations? http://i.imgur.com/h3IshHe.png

ByronFortescue• 13 years ago

I'm having the same issue. It seems the page is full of non-working snippets like this.

_yb• 13 years ago

http://www.teehanlax.com/story/medium/ try entering through this, it worked for me

Shamiq2• 13 years ago

Thanks, that works.

zipop2• 13 years ago

Medium does not seem to have a way to post from an iPad. It says I have an unsupported browser. Really, Medium? Or am I missing something?

caseyf7• 13 years ago

If Medium is the future of publishing, I'm going to need a robot to scroll for me. That was great, but now I'm tired.

whostolemyhat• 13 years ago

Yep, I could only fit about five sentences on the screen at once. I ended up zooming out to about 70% to make it more comfortable to read.

ValentineC• 13 years ago

Loved the article, not a fan of the 2.4MB video of hands typing on an Apple keyboard [1] I was forced to download. I'm just glad I wasn't on a mobile connection (tethered or otherwise) with a bandwidth cap.

I searched for methods to disable MP4 video downloading on both Chrome and Firefox, but they don't appear to work (for Firefox, it was about setting media.autoplay.enabled to false). If anyone knows how I would be able to do so, I would appreciate learning how to.

[1] http://www.teehanlax.com/resources/img/story/medium/header.m... (2.4MB)

benjamincburns• 13 years ago

Not to mention that on a 13" rMBP it pushes the title below the fold. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence to try their "distraction free" writing interface...

msglenn• 13 years ago

Which is sad, because I've found Medium to be a terrific blogging tool for people who don't want to be full time bloggers.

The interface is really very easy to use, with the only annoying thing being the difficulty in browsing Collections when deciding which one to post your work in.

call• 13 years ago

The whole damn page is 13 MB. It took over a minute to load on my 1.5mbps bandwidth-capped WiMax connection. The tab in Chrome is using over 200MB of memory on my Mac. With chrome using the maximum possible screen real estate, I can't even read the title on my 1440x900 mbp. http://cl.ly/PK8o

A+

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

With Javascript off, the tab in Chrome is only taking ~75 MB on my Lenovo.

markdown6• 13 years ago

It's 28.4 megs.

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

2.4 MB for a video that is part of what was clearly a designed interactive experience for desktop/laptop doesn't seem like any kind of big deal.

harlanlewis• 13 years ago

This "designed for laptop" sentiment and (most) of the parallax et al "experience" sites kind of upset me. People use tablets and phones. Acknowledge reality and provide content tolerable to the medium.

I give Teehan+Lax and portfolio sites in general a free pass on this (most important visitors are sitting at desks), but much of the internet seems to willfully disregard audience needs and desires as devices, contexts, and limitations expand.

kGrange• 13 years ago

Not to mention users like me, who opened it in a background tab, never even saw the video playing. I wouldn't have known it was anything but a blurry image if I hadn't seen this comment.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

NoScript is one way.

xSwag• 13 years ago

Install Ad-block and add custom regex blocking all .mp4 files? I'd give you an example but I'm on my mobile right now

cmelbye• 13 years ago

Wow, great article but terribly designed website. Really slow scrolling, confusing layout, not sure what I could interact with and what I couldn't. (Some elements used the "pointing hand" cursor yet indicating I could click, yet did nothing when I clicked.)

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

It's a decent layout if you turn off Javascript.

wiremine• 13 years ago

I had the completely opposite reaction: I thought it the layout was excellent. (Although I agree the reaction on the mouse over was confusing).

markdown6• 13 years ago

The page is beautiful, but is designed for a very narrow range of computing devices.

28MB will cost you a fortune on 3g if you don't have a good plan, and the page will be freeze most devices and be unusable on most of the rest.

Might as well have used Flash.

lucian19002• 13 years ago

Not to mention the stupid top bar that moved around the page. Websites don't get to have chrome!

spazmaster• 13 years ago

I thought the top bar was nifty. It only showed when you scrolled back up. When you scroll back up you might be looking for a way to continue somewhere else, and that's when they show you the top bar with it's menu.

alberth• 13 years ago

Reading the site on my smartphone, it was excellent.

Reading the site on my laptop, it was horrible.

That could explain the mixed responses to the UI of the site.

thoughtcriminal3• 13 years ago

I personally won't ever use Medium because it deprives the author of branding and recognition.

barretts• 13 years ago

Why, simply because it's hosted on a different domain? It seems to help people reach an audience wider than they would otherwise, which is anything but bad for branding.

thoughtcriminal3• 13 years ago

A wider reach isn't a given, especially for someone who writes well and has basic marketing skills.

Besides, on the rare occasion I have read an article on Medium (I don't anymore) I could never remember the author. It's all just the faceless Borg.

For anyone thinking of using Medium, don't do it. It's like giving your work away for free, and for no recognition.

intropic• 13 years ago

I wonder what the reasoning was behind branding the author in the URL path as opposed to as a subdomain. It seems like a very strange approach to take from guys who have done the latter before.

If nothing else it sure makes posts from Medium very annoying on HN because I can't actually tell which blogger's post I'm going to read until I click the link (primarily read on iPad so no hovering).

thoughtcriminal3• 13 years ago

It's not annoying for Medium. It's free labor.

Lukeas14• 13 years ago

SEO would be one theory. Pages under the same 'www' subdomain will provide a more positive SEO boost to medium.com than pages under various subdomains.

bowerbird• 13 years ago

i read this article back when it was first released, but my memory is that the takeaway message was that if you've got a lot of money to spend on designers, designers will be quite happy to take it from you. :+)

-bowerbird

saeidm• 13 years ago

I still like http://throwww.com better. I'm only saying that cause I built Throwww, though.

robotmay• 13 years ago

I had almost this exact same idea last year (a one-off blogging platform). It wouldn't have looked anywhere near this nice though, good work :)

zipop2• 13 years ago

I reallyyy like what you've done. Similar to http://pen.io

markdown6• 13 years ago

WTF! 28.4 megabytes

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dYfjkg/http://www.teehanlax....

NSilver1776• 13 years ago

I really like the idea here, the quality of information has been so badly degraded by spam and status updates that it would be valuable to have a place for meaningful discussions on abstract ideas.

ranjez• 13 years ago

Its taken twice the time and 10 times the people and budget to build something half as great as Glipho I guess silicon valley is all about who you know!

marban• 13 years ago

If you guys are interested in a similar tool like medium (without the network), I'll be launching http://www.postagon.com next week.

msutherl• 13 years ago

Yeah, the problem with Medium is that it's beautiful and well designed – almost perfect, really – but the community is so Silicon Valley. I wouldn't want my writing associated with that trash.

The making of Medium.com

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