5 ways to make your Medium technical blog moar awesome

All the ways in which you can embed code projects and content into your blog

The vaguest and most under-sold feature of Medium is support for embed links.

I noticed this only once by pasting a link to a GitHub Gist and suddenly my Gist was embedded in the page. Nice. Turns out there are over 400 supported websites, using a service called embedly.

1. CodePicnic

CodePicnic is a way of creating a live shell to demonstrate and app or idea in almost any language.

If it runs on GNU/Linux, CodePicnic can handle it.

They currently support: Bash, js, Mono, Elixir, Go, Nodejs, Php, Python, Ruby, Dancer, Laravel, Phoenix, Rails, Mongodb, Redis, and basically anything you can install. Sign up for a free account or pay for more consoles and apps.

2. CodePen and CodePly

CodePen allows you to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and get a real-time preview. You can use CodePen to:

• Show off the amazing things you build.
• Learn new things by tinkering.
• Build reduced test cases to report bugs and get help on tricky problems.
• Try out new technologies for the first time.
• Build components to later use elsewhere.

CodePen added support for embedly in 2015.

3. Gist

Just copy and paste any Gist URL into Medium and it will embed the code into your blog. It supports syntax-highlighting and colors to give the readers an easier way to understand what you’re showing off.

4. Screencast.com

If you use Camtasia, then you might be familiar with Screenshare.com. With Screencast.com you can easily record and host screencasts. This is a great way of showing demos of your work.

Medium supports embedding screenshares and screencast.com has a free 2GB account option.

5. ChartBlocks

Showing the value of your post can sometimes be done with a pretty graph. Don’t screenshot and paste an image, give your readers a clear, embedded chart. ChartBlocks is a D3.js hosting service that supports embedding in Medium.