As good as it is, having your own blog outside of Medium is still not a bad idea. It enables you to have another channel you can totally own to communicate with your readers. And who knows, no company can last forever, what if Medium got acquired by some other company or something even worse happen. You can still sleep well at night knowing you won’t lose all your articles. Medium is a great publication platform. It has good exposure, quality content, readers that really appreciate good articles and a neat and easy to use UI. It’s especially great for writers that just start their journey. I built using , a Python-based . I wrote an explaining the whole process. For every Medium article, I need to copy the URL, run some command to transfer it into Markdown file, then generate the blog site using Pelican. It is simple, but not as simple as I like it to be. So this is a great opportunity for some quick and dirty Bash script to come for the rescue. Let’s see what we can do. my own Pelican static site generator article Structure the Script Before start writing the script, it helps to structure out what we want to accomplish, makes it easier to write quality code. Basically, we need to: Put all article URLs into one text file manually(plan to automate this part too in the future, using some scraping framework maybe)Read every line of the file, and for each line.Extract the title and subtitleUse the title and subtitle to create meta-data needed for Pelican to turn the Markdown file into a post.Run Pelican command to generate the static site.Push the site to GitHub and trigger Netlify’s auto-buildProfit. Let’s Write the Code First of all, define our variables filename= n=1 #!/bin/bash # Define variables 'articles.txt' The structure the loop to read every line of the text file: line; n=$((n+1)) 
    slug=$( | sed ) FILE= mediumexporter > < # Read in file and do processing on each one while read do # reading each line echo $line 's/https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\///' # get slug from URL " /wayofnumbers.github.io/content/ .md" $HOME $slug # generate Markdown file name from slug $line $FILE # convert medium article to markdown file # some processing ... done $filename We used the command to remove the first part of the URL: so the rest could be used as our slug. For example, turns into , perfect for a slug. Here we also uses the slug to create the filename for the MarkDown file. Then we use to transfer URL into the Markdown file. You can find out more about . sed https://towardsdatascience.com/ https://towardsdatascience.com/9-things-i-learned-from-blogging-on-medium-for-the-first-month-2bace214b814 9-things-i-learned-from-blogging-on-medium-for-the-first-month-2bace214b814 mediumexporter mediumexporter here Now that we have the Markdown file, let’s fill in the processing code we want: tail -n +2 > && mv fl=$(head -n 1 ) firstline=$( | sed ) tail -n +3 > && mv subtitle=$(head -n 1 ) tail -n +2 > && mv # Processing the markdown file " " $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " " $FILE # remove the first line $FILE # put first line (title) into fl echo $fl 's/# //' # Remove '# ' " " $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " " $FILE # remove the first line $FILE # put first line (subtitle) into subtitle " " $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " .tmp" $FILE " " $FILE # remove the first two line These lines are rather self-explanatory. Now we have variable as the title and variable as the subtitle, we are now ready to construct the Markdown file meta-data for Pelican: firstline subtitle # handle metadata Pelican  
meta= for "
Title: $firstline
Slug: $slug
Subtitle: $subtitle
Date: $(date)
Category: Machine Learning
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
author: Michael Li
Summary: $firstline
[TOC]
" You can refer to Pelican’s document for more information about the meta-data format. Simply put, the Markdown file doesn’t need to specifically write the title and subtitle, as long as we specify the title and subtitle field in our meta-data, Pelican will automatically generate them for you in the post, with specific styles per the theme you choose. here With the correct meta-data, now we can finally update the Markdown and get it ready for site generation: { -n ; cat ; } > .new mv {.new,} 
head -n -8 > .new mv {.new,} < echo " " $meta $FILE $FILE # sticth meta-data and article content together $FILE $FILE $FILE # Remove medium's recommended articles $FILE done $filename # don't forget to enclose the loop. All my Medium articles have several recommendations for further readings. I removed those for my blog(the last line of code above). Now that the Markdown file is ready, time to generate the site and push it to the server: /wayofnumbers.github.io
pelican content -s publishconf.py 
git add .
git commit -m git push origin dev # push to server cd $HOME "fix" Conclusion So there you go. This script only works on Pelican static site generator, but the gist of it can be applied to any of your blogging platforms. I hope you learned a thing or two. And happy blogging/coding! Found this article useful? Follow me ( ) on Medium or you can find me on Twitter or my blog site . Michael Li @lymenlee wayofnumbers.com

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