Medium Hasn’t Announced This Awesome New Feature Change Yet
And they copied it from porn sites! I’m enjoying it already…Seriously.
I was tinkering by myself today, as I often do, when I came across something.
On Medium, of course. I’m not sure what else you could have imagined. Sicko.
Have you searched for anything in the last few days? You know, that seldom-used search box up in the top right corner of the Medium screen.
This little guy that no one ever uses:
Some people say it looks like an armless torso slowly falling to its death. But in reality, it opens up a whole new amazing world of search functionality!
And they’ve been quietly improving it — a lot. Woo!
New Thing #1: The basic function now works properly
First off the bat, the basic functionality of it is now, well, functioning.
For a long time, if you were on somebody’s Medium profile page creeping, I mean reading, and you went to the search box and typed something, it would show you this:
That “Search all of Medium” option is actually clickable. And it never really worked before. If memory serves me correct, it would almost always search for that term across all of Medium.
Occasionally, if you were browsing inside certain areas of a publication, it would let you search articles only in that pub. Which was cool for creeping related topics. I mean reading.
Anywho, now if I mosey on over to my profile and search in the box, you can see options like the below pop up:
PS. If you’re wondering why my search bar in the last pic is blue, that’s because I changed my profile design, here’s my guide for that.
It looks like it searches for any word that’s been included in a story or comments posted by the profile owner (in this case, me, myself, and I, J.J. Pryor).
For example, I searched for ‘shirtless’ there and nothing popped up. But when I reduced the keyword to just ‘shirt’, you see the links available above.
And no, I can’t remember what a coffee-shirt is. Nor why I have a preference for them.
But I certainly do.
New Thing #2: SORTING!!!
Okay, maybe sorting doesn’t get you nearly as hot and bothered as it does for me. But that’s cuz I’m obviously way cooler than any of you who don’t get aroused at the thought of sorting data.
Not this Data:
If you go into the search bar and search for anything randomly, let’s say “coffee shirts”, you’ll arrive at this screen:
Nothing really new here except 2 coffee-loving guys named Steven. And apparently, I hold the top spot for coffee shirts. Winning!
But the new part — look at the right side where the TAGS are. Click one of those. Let’s say we click on ‘Coffee’ (sadly there’s no Coffee Shirts tag…yet).
You’ll pop over to this amazing page:
Holy crap, that’s a lot of new functions. Notice I wrote very neatly scribbled letters of A, B, and C there for us to discuss below.
A) Sorting!
Here on the left side, we can now sort any of these tags by popularity, the latest, and the top-performing.
My guess is the ‘Popular’ section means what’s been viewed a lot recently, whereas the ‘Top’ section is for the time period. Latest is a word you should know the definition of already.
If you go to the ‘Top’ section, you can also adjust the time period by week, month, year, or all time.
AKA Porn-site level of sorting. Yay!
Not that I would know, of course.
As of the time of this writing, the ‘This week’ and ‘This month’ didn’t work, but the other two did.
And I’m pretty sure they all worked yesterday when I was tinkering away in my dark room alone not looking at porn sites for 3 hours.
B) Total tags!
Before this screen existed, to see how many stories a certain tag was being used for, you’d have to pull up the tag in the publishing screen of an article. (Don’t ask, it’s confusing.)
Even then, the numbers didn’t seem to change very often.
I never could figure out if it was the number of times stories were tagged or something more nefarious that I now forget.
Either way, we certainly never saw how many writers wrote about a specific tag! Very cool to see. I’ll explain why later. Or maybe in another article.
“ADHD much today?” I silently whisper to myself.
C) Popular writers!
Want to know who your competition is on here?
Well screw you, we’re all in this together. There are no competitors.
“A rising tide raises all boats.”
But just in case you want to punch a hole in someone else’s boat, you can look at this list to pick which boat in the harbor you’re going to sabotage for your own personal gain.
Before this update, you could only see popular writers in a tag IF it was considered a tag eligible for Top Writer status. That’s only something like 73 tags according to my own short but sweet article on the subject.
See how I subtly sneak in links to other articles? Damn, I’m good.
But now, no matter what ungodly subject you want to write about, you can see who else is writing on the same topic.
‘Japanese Food’? Hai, Arigatō.
‘Raspberry Pi’? No, not the delicious kind. The nerdy one. They got you, fam.
‘DIY’? Ah, even my favorite self-tinkering subject is here.
The bottom line
If you write in a few subjects consistently and find yourself using the same tags over and over again, it’s probably well worth your time to go check out these new tools.
Explore what’s doing well lately, what’s worked best in the past, and what articles were viewed the most in the entire history of Medium!
And while you’re at it, stoke out your competition and see who’s boats are most deserving of getting a ‘spontaneous entirely random and accidental’ leak.
Or if you’re too afraid of having a lot of competition, sneak around for a while until you find a tag with lots of stories but very few writers.
More volume with less competition? If only my dating life could be so lucky.
Until next time, Feediumites.
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