Use Medium’s New Lists Feature To Showcase Your Articles
It’s easier than ever to keep your articles relevant. Here’s my simple approach.
I only recently stumbled upon an article by Paul Ryburn, M.Sc. sharing an approach to creating index pages. I really appreciated the idea and proceeded to implement something similar on my own Medium profile page. And now with a recent update to Medium, the new Lists feature has made this a far easier process for everyone to set up.
One way you can use the new Lists feature is to help keep your older articles from being lost to time. As we all know, the chances of our articles being found on someone’s feed after even a short time has passed are slim indeed. But when you add your own articles to relevant lists, they are easily accessible to readers regardless of how long ago you wrote them.
Let’s go through the steps together to create a new list, and see how easy it is to add Medium articles to them. These instructions will be written with a computer in mind, but following the steps on mobile devices should be fairly similar.
Making A New List
If you go to view your profile page by clicking on your picture in the top-right corner of Medium, and then clicking on your name, you’ll notice at the top there’s a new “Lists” option. It’s in the top banner between your follower count and the link to your “About” page. At the time of writing this article, it even has “New” written in smaller letters to help catch your attention.
If you click that “Lists” link, you’ll get to see the lists you have made from the point of view of the reader. Any list which has the little gray lock icon next to the “View List” button, like the Reading List has by default, means it’s a private list that only you can see. From this page however, you can’t create new lists, only view existing ones.
To create a new list, you’ll want to click on your picture in the top-right corner of the page to bring up the menu. Scroll down until you see the “Lists” option here (which has “New” next to it currently as well) and click that to access a different lists page. It looks more like your Stories page where you write and publish from. Alternatively, you can also click the double-bookmark looking icon by your picture in the top-right of the Medium homepage.
From here you will see a “New List” button at the top right of the screen. Click that to make a new list. This will open a simple view that asks for only a few details. You need to give your new list a name by typing in the box. If you’d like to add a description, you can click those words, and it will give you a text box to type in. The description will appear similar to how Medium displays an article’s tag line (the first line you type below the main title.) If you wish to make the list private so that only you will be able to see it, you can check the box next to “Make it private” as well. Then click the “Create” button and you have your shiny new list!
Filling Up Your List With Cool Stuff
Adding articles to a list couldn’t be easier. Simply open any writing piece just like you would when you go to read it, and find the icon that looks like a bookmark. It should be next to the ellipses (three dots) icon, and possibly some others. Sometimes it is located at the top of the page, or other times it will be near the bottom.
When you click the icon, a menu pops up showing your lists. Simply check the box next to a list you want to add it to, and uncheck the box for any you don’t want it to appear in. You can also check boxes for multiple lists at the same time, for convenient and quick adding to any lists that you think would be appropriate or relevant.
Re-Arranging The Items In A List
If you find you don’t like the order that the writing appears in one of your lists, you can move them around by going to the Lists option via the Medium menu, just like you did when creating a new list. Click on one of your existing lists from there to open it, and at the top-right, click the ellipses “…” button to bring up a menu.
From there you will see the “Reorder Items” option. Click that, and Medium will show another view. Off to the side you will see marks that look like an equals sign “=” and you simply click and hold down the mouse button to move that item elsewhere on the list.
What’s Next?
That’s as far as I have explored this new feature, and there may be more functionality left to discover, or added in the future by Medium. I haven’t yet found a way to reorder the actual lists themselves, for example. If you have any tips or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below! Thanks for reading!
