Summary

The website content invites readers to join the author's Discord community and participate as beta testers for new Medium extensions, emphasizing the collaborative benefits and the development of a new earnings-focused extension.

Abstract

The author extends an invitation to join their Discord server for real-time communication and collaboration, particularly highlighting the inadequacies of Medium's comment system. The post also calls for beta testers to help refine new Medium extensions, stressing the importance of diverse data sets for thorough testing. A new extension that tracks Medium earnings is introduced, with a disclaimer about its development priority. The author emphasizes the value of community feedback and open communication for continuous improvement of Medium and its extensions.

Opinions

The author expresses a high regard for Anthony Lawrence's contributions in finding bugs and inspiring new ideas.
Discord is praised for its effectiveness in communication and bug tracking, surpassing Medium's comment functionality.
The author shows apprehension about the limited scope of their own testing and acknowledges the need for broader user input.
There is a commitment to releasing bug-free beta versions of extensions, with a quick turnaround for fixes.
The author admits to a lack of passion for the earnings-focused extension but is open to feedback and further development based on user needs.
The author values reaching a wider audience over focusing on earnings from Medium posts.
The importance of community engagement is underscored, with an open invitation for all types of feedback to improve the Medium experience.

Join Our Discord and/or Join The Beta-Testers

Let’s do this together! (oh, and there’s a new extension)

School photo created by rawpixel.com — www.freepik.com

A quick update on how to join the conversation on discord, how to join the beta testers and a sneak peek into a new Medium extension.

The wonderful Anthony Lawrence is a great source of inspiration for new ideas and he also does a tremendous job at finding bugs in updates of my extensions. For release popcorn (3.0) he once again managed to find a nasty within a few hours after the release. We need more people like him!

And, we need people like you!

Join Discord

The last few weeks I have been chatting with a few people over Discord. It’s wonderful to be able to chat without having to deal with Medium’s poor comment-functionality. Using Discord, Anthony and I were able to track down the bugs in the latest release lightning fast.

We shared a couple of messages and every now and then we shared an image. How wonderful. Who would have thought this possible in the 21st Century?

Discord aims primarily at gamers, but it’s very useful to just about anyone who wants to connect to other people. It’s comparable to other collaboration tools, like slack, but in my experience Discord aims a bit more at synchronous communication (although it saves all messages indefinitely).

The Secret Aspirant and I have briefly discussed opening up Discord for everyone. We decided to give it a go. Click here to join us. You can use the desktop app, or the web browser. Afraid to use the camera or worried that you’re in the wrong timezone? Don’t be. No one will force you to do something you don’t want and you can always check messages at your own leisure.

Beta testers needed

Developing Medium-extensions comes down to reverse engineering Medium’s architecture. As such I can only test the data contained by my mere 120 stories that were published in the last 5 months. For example: I don’t have series (some thing of the past; Medium no longer supports them). For all I know their structure is radically different from other stories.

With the number of users growing, my apprehension of not having tested thoroughly enough also grows. There’s only so much I can test with my own limited set of data.

And that’s where you come in. I want to provide early access to my extensions for those that want the next-gen functionality, but don’t mind running into a bug every now and then.

What would it entail? First, I would like you to join Discord. There I can grant you access to the development version. I’d like you to use that extension instead of the regular one when it is available. Additionally, you’ll have access to my new extension way earlier.

I plan to release updates to this version sooner than the regular ones. In return, I’d like you to report any bugs you find. Why? It takes Google more than a day before they give the heads up to a new version. I can fix a bug within minutes, but then still take a long time before everyone gets it. Working with something broken takes the fun out of it. I want everyone to be free of frustration.

I want my release to be as bug-free as possible. I work on this in my spare time and don’t want to be forced to work on something when I should be doing other things. And that is what happened this weekend. Between Hallowe’en celebrations I snuck away from my family to punch away on my keyboard like a madman and growl in frustration and yelp like a zombie in the study. Oh, and I was dressed like a vampire.

If you decide to join the beta testers and you find a particularly nasty bug, by the way, you can just enable the regular version, so you won’t be bothered by the bug that much. This is new for me as well and I don’t know how many versions I will release. My aim is to release bug-free beta-versions, so this should be a win-win for everybody.

Want to join the beta-testers? Join us at Discord and let me know!

One more thing

Last version I worked on some stuff that I ended up throwing away. I did learn a few tricks, though. One of them involved being able to get all your earnings from Medium. Our resident idea-man, Anthony Lawrence, requested to see how your posts had been doing the last couple of days in terms of views and earnings.

So, I decided to create something for this.

The new extension in its full glory! Will you look at those green bills! Screenshot by author.

As of yet, I don’t want to include this in Medium Distribution Info. I like my software to focus. So, I created an extension that displays your earnings per story, on a day-to-day basis. The first version is ready and I have just uploaded it to the Chrome Webstore. It’s only available for beta-testers. If you can’t wait for it, you know what to do.

To be frank, I am not very passionate about this extension. I care about reaching a larger audience here and earnings are just a bonus. I don’t know how many updates the extension will get. Nor do I know how frequent they will be. I just want to issue a fair warning that development on this will be lower on my priority-list than the Distribution Info extension.

The first version has the basics covered. An overview on a page and an option to download. Hopefully, the extension works as expected on accounts other than my own. Then, I can extend the extension with the feedback I get from you. It has everything I need already.

Wait, there’s more!

Actually, there isn’t. I just wanted to stress that we can make Medium (and by extension my extensions) a better place by communication. Hit that comment button to give feedback. Anything goes: rants, jokes, harsh critiques, compliments, and requests. Just let it all out.

Can’t find the comment button? Join us on discord!