PRO TIPS FROM OLD FACE
Your Place in the Sun
Don’t miss out!
IF YOU STUMBLED ON THIS SOMEHOW DO NOT FOLLOW THE TECHNIQUES OR ADVICE CONTAINED HERE. YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF MEDIUM RULES IF YOU DO
Forgive me for the digression, but the need for this PSA grows by the day:Help us do the job for which we Mudditors are not paid but perform entirely out of love for you, our writers.Please do not dismiss or delete the private notes.Thank you. Now on with the article!You can’t take advantage of your moment in the sun if you don’t even get one!
Whenever we publish one of your articles on MuddyUm, provided you have not already published it, it will appear at the top of our feed, in full view of our vast and sophisticated readership. That’s for you — that’s when you get your moment in the sun.
So don’t waste it. With that in mind, here is
Another Pro Tip from Baskerville Old Face
Our MuddyUm main page feed is in chronological order of the date of publication anywhere, not the date of publication in MuddyUm. Therefore, even though we accept previously published articles, it’s a bad idea to publish first then submit, in spite of what other Medium writers may tell you.
MuddyUm is a popular publication, meaning we publish articles several times a day. We actually edit the articles we publish, meaning the editorial team is Richard Scary level busy.
If you published your article even two days previous to when you submitted it to MuddyUm, I promise you, even with our crack editorial team jumping out of their perfect lives and into your article, like we do, when the editorial process is through and we publish it, no one will see it. It will be buried under all the un-previously-published drafts we publish. They will all have publication dates newer than yours.
What to do if you already screwed this up Open your article in the Medium story editor. With the cursor anywhere hit Ctrl-A. Then Hit Ctrl-C. Then go to the drop-down under your profile picture and select “Write a story”. When the blank story editor opens click someplace and hit Ctrl-V. Note that your whole story appears along with a lot of miscellaneous bullshit in the beginning and at the end. Don’t worry —I will soon describe to you how to get rid of that.
Find your original, published article in your story list. Locate the three dots at the bottom, click them, and select delete story. Don’t be afraid. If you have been following directions, nothing bad will happen. But! If you leave it there and submit the copy to us and we publish it you will have identical stories on Medium. Not only is that bad, it’s naughty! If Medium notices you will receive an official Medium nastygram and will have to take one of them down.
Return to your newly created draft. Delete the bullshit that came along for the ride from the beginning and the end. For example, here is a story of mine that I did that with, except that I didn’t delete the original.¹
As you can see all the MuddyUm tabs came along for the ride. I just delete them along with the MuddyUm logo.
As you can see it now thinks the kicker, “LEVEL UP, SUCKERS!” is the title. I have to put that in subtitle case, then back the title, “Five Ways to Next Level Your Life,” up to its proper place, which will cause it to revert to title case, then back the subtitle, “#3 will floor you,” to its proper place, but I will have to explicitly put it in subtitle case. Then the header will look right.
As you can see there is more to do, but you get the idea. There will be a weird little shadow image above each of your images. You have to get rid of those. You will notice that what once were your image captions are now ordinary text below the images. Just copy/paste them back into captionhood.
At the end of your article there is sure to be a lot of crapola you don’t want in the new draft. Just delete all of it. You get the idea I am sure. Only intelligent people submit their articles to MuddyUm.
¹ Because I have no intention of publishing the new version. This is for your information only.