Meta-Medium: I wanted to write, so I built something to help me figure out where to write

Well, as with most other nonsense that I find myself involved in. I started with an idea I wanted to write about. And then I immediately found myself a new side-quest.

You see, writing your own blogs on Medium is fine. But getting involved with a publication does tend to get some additional eyes on your writing. Which is great! But which one!? How do I know which publications correspond to my niche topic? How do I find who to talk to, how to submit, etc.

Well according to the best searches and queries I provided to our search and AI overlords - apparently the current best hope is some lucky keyword searching on the Medium website AND this curated list by the Medium Staff . The curated list is great. However, it's just a big ol' list. You can't search it by name. You can't search it by topic. And it's definitely not a living or complete list as you'll see by all the comments in the thread.

It just feels like we can do better.

So here is my submission that absolutely nobody asked for.

The Requirements

• I wanted to be able to see a comprehensive list of publications
• I wanted to be able to search them by name
• I wanted to be able to search them by keyword
• And maybe sometime I'd also like to search them by editor

The Problem

• Well, we can't fix all the problems. We still don't have a great way to populate this with up to date information. It will still require someone updating the list. Just like the curated list from the Medium staff, there will need to be some mechanism for submitting a publication information to be added to the list. And because it's the internet, you want that to be validated by something before it just gets added.

Well, you can't win them all. But you can start to make it better. So ignoring that fact that this list will still need to be opt-in, we can at least make interacting with it a bit better.

The Answer

And because I can't pass up the chance to buy a domain, now we've got mediumbpubs.com

The most important piece of the site to call out can be seen below:

In no way, shape or form is this affiliated with Medium.com

This was just a fun side project to solve a problem that I was seeing. In the end, I hope it helps others.

When you first land on the site, you'll see a little description of of the problem space that first made me want to put this together in the first place. From there, there are really two components that users will interact with: the submission form and the catalog.

Submit Your Publication!

Well, without a list of publications this would be rather pointless. And as I mentioned, this will still need to be opt-in for now. There are no real requirements outside of:

• Does this seem real?
• Is this not empty?
• Are there real editors?

This project isn't here to be an arbiter of "the best publications". But it does hope to be free of garbage. We'll see how that evolves if/when this becomes useful to folks. But for now, this is the front door to get into the catalog.

For the submission itself, we're really looking to populate just a handful of fields for now:

• The name of your publication
• A link to the publication itself
• A contact email for the publication
• An optional logo/icon for the publication
• Links to one or more of the editors for the publication
• Any related keywords that you'd like to relate to the publication

The Publication Catalog

Once a submisison has been reviewed and merged in, it will then be searchable in the catalog. Once populated with real data, it might look something like this

From there, you'll see the available publications that we currently know about and we can start doing some searching over them. We can search by name, by contact and even editor. More interestingly, you can click on any set of the keywords and you'll begin to filter the above list.

Build It And They Will (Hopefully) Come

Again, this was more just to scratch an itch. But to be clear, it is alive! You can visit mediumpubs.com right now to see the site. But for it to be useful, it needs you! It needs the information about these publications to be useful. Yes, I could definitely just scrape those lists and threads that exist. But that feels a little gross to me. I want things to appear here because folks want to be included. So we'll let this populate organically.

So tell me, which publications do you love the most? Let's get them added to the list! Is there additional information you'd like to be able to search on? Let's hear it in the comments.