What’s a Matrix Without a Glitch or Two?
By: Timothy Key
Tags: Leadership, Inspiration, Writing, Reading, Poetry

Medium has a lot of great features. The story editor, while a bit limited in format options, is intuitive, easy to use and makes a great eye-catching story. The ability to build publications is pretty cool, and the interface between writers and readers is really pretty special.

There is a lot to like about Medium all around, and in a lot of ways it is remarkable how resilient the platform is. For instance, I have never lost even a few words of a draft story. The historical draft preservation, even across multiple open tabs is pretty awesome too.

But, every once in a while, there is a glitch. One of the built-in features of the platform that I have been using pretty regularly is the ability to pre-schedule articles for publishing. I love being able to set the schedule so that my article publishes just when I want.

Yesterday that feature didn’t work right though. The daily update piece that I pre-scheduled to post at 5:07 am my time today mysteriously showed up in the regular queue for publication yesterday. It wasn’t supposed to appear in there at all.

ILLUMINATION is a busy publication and it got pushed out in the normal flow of editors working through the articles. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And, I am not really naïve or narcissistic enough to believe that anyone is sitting by their computer waiting for my daily feature to come out at precisely 5:07 am either.

But it makes me feel better if my updates are spaced more than just a few hours apart. So, guess what?

Yep! Mini feature. Whoop, whoop!

Plus, one of the benefits of a re-do is that I can update things I missed and bring you a bonus daily tip!

The Daily Tip! (Bonus Edition)

Revitalize your older stories! Medium prohibits duplicate content, and one of the things you cannot do is delete an existing established story, then re-publish it. At least not without making substantive changes to the story, including the title.

But what can you do if you have an older story that is pretty solid, but you wish a few more people could get their eyes on it? One good way to do that is exactly what I am doing here. You can write up a teaser for your older story with a new title and enough content within the new story to make it viable on its own — then link your older story in the new one.

This works especially well if there is something going on in the news that relates to your prior story, making it especially pertinent today. Another approach is linking two of your older stories with a common new theme i.e. you have two older poems about autumn leaves and it’s the first day of fall.

Speaking of Poems

Something I missed putting in my regular feature is Dr Mehmet Yildiz‘s new invitation to poets which encourages using YouTube videos to support your writing. Read all about it here:

ILLUMINATION Daily Bulletin

One of the minor drawbacks of scheduling my July feature ahead of time is that the link to Dr. Yildiz’s daily story bulletin might be a day behind. This mini update allows me to bring you the hottest-off-the-press version; here:

Link to Regular Feature

And, just in case you are the one person sitting by the computer at 5:07 am, here is the link to my errantly pre-published full feature for today, July 27, 2020:

Thanks for reading!

P. S. Ironically, when I went to publish this a few hours ago to meet that 5:07 am deadline, Medium was struggling with images for some reason, and I could not upload a picture for this until now.

Shhh. Don’t say anything though, I don’t want them to feel bad after I talked them up in the first part of the article! ;-)