Publishing to R-bloggers via Medium

Medium is a great platform to get your blog started. It is incredibly easy to use, has a visually appealing layout, and can help expand the reach to your intended audience. With just a few tweaks, it can also be perfect for publishing to R-bloggers.

The main requirement to join the R-bloggers mailing list is an RSS feed, which Medium automatically creates for you. When you create your first post, you will already have a feed specific to you as a writer. For example, you can access my author feed at https://medium.com/feed/@timothy.c.black. This may be enough for you, depending on the answers to the next couple of questions.

Do you plan on publishing content that is not related to R?

If the answer is No, then you have it easy. Simply use the RSS feed that is specific to you as an author and you are done!

If the answer is Yes, you will want to filter your feed using tags that you define, such as “R”. Unfortunately, Medium doesn’t let you use filter your author RSS feed by keywords. Instead, you need to create a publication.

Following the steps outlined here by Gabriel Reynard, I named my publication “Tim Black.” It is a fairly straightforward setup and you will then have the ability for your RSS feed to be filtered by keywords such as “R”. You can access my posts related just to R using the following feed: https://medium.com/feed/tim-black/tagged/R.

Do you plan on publishing your articles on multiple Medium publications?

If you contribute (or plan on contributing) to multiple publications, you won’t be able to filter using your publication name and tag. We are back to the same predicament as before with the inability to filter by both author and tag!

Sebastian Wolf published an excellent article on how to ingest your original author feed, process it using PHP, then publish a new RSS feed for R-bloggers (though you’ll have to also do the work of setting up your own server and hosting the PHP script).

Once you have your RSS feed set…

Link back to R-bloggers

Bloggers are required to link back to R-bloggers somewhere prominent on their site. Since Medium doesn’t have an about page or a blogroll, make sure to add a link back to www.r-bloggers.com somewhere in your post. I add my links to the bottom of each post. Feel free to also add a link to www.r-users.com.

Make sure to add tags

The filter on your publication only works if you add the tags. Pick one that you will use for all the posts you would like to be published to R-bloggers and submit your filtered feed during the request process.

Don’t become part of the paywall!

When you initially publish your article, Medium will ask you if you would like to make your post “eligible to earn money and allow curators to recommend my story to interested readers.” If you want to make sure your article is freely available to anyone who is interested, do not check this box. You can read more about the metered paywall system here.

For more great examples of R in action, check out R-bloggers and R-users.

Publishing to R-bloggers via Medium was originally published in Tim Black on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.