Moving From Medium
I decided to get my content exported from Medium as a zip. The zip file contains all your posts and more, but on thing that it lacks are your images. I find it strange that they were not included and is it really a complete export without them?
I wonder what the reason for not including the images are.. 🤔
- It would take longer to export your content?
- The zip would be too large? Storage is cheap and the export is only available for 24 hours so it sounds unlikely.
- I don’t own them anymore? I guess this is true 🤷♂️.
- Images are not considered important? They are a blogging platform not a gallery?
- Make it harder for people to actually migrate? Dark pattern to keep users from leaving.
How I secured my images
The exported zip contains a HTML version of your posts. I opened them up in firefox and in the console I ran:
document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach(img => console.log(img.src + '\t' + img.alt))
I then put the output into a file, files, and looped over the entries to download and name the files.
while read p; do
url=`echo $p | awk '{print$1}'`
name=`echo $p | awk '{print$2}'`
wget -O ${name}.jpg $url
done <files
Reflecting over older posts
A couple of things stood out to me when I reviewed the older articles, I’ve migrated multiple times and that I’ve fiddled with different technologies during my years of writing. I’m not the most frequent writer, but a writer nonetheless.
My blog has migrated from a self-hosted wordpress site, to medium and to gitlab-pages.
The technologies I’ve worked with have changed from PHP, C#, nodejs and now to Java. It’s crazy to think how much can change in 5 years!
I wonder what the next 5 years have in store for me?
