All right, I'm live. I'm going to vamp a little bit for a couple minutes let people trickle in if that's still happening. My name is Tony Stubblebine. I'm the CEO here at Medium. And I wrote a draft specifically for today and I'm going to show you how I format things and why. I can see we got comments. Mostly just a joke. But I'll take questions if people have questions. I think I'm probably going to go like 2 or 3 minutes of just giving people time to show up and if you want me to talk about anything in that brief window, put it in the comments. If not, I'll just ramble.
Hope everyone can see my screen. Yeah, one of the games we're going to play is how many unreleased features can you spot while I do this demo? I think we're going to talk about I think there'll be at least three that get mentioned. Good good good. Hi Sam. Hi Medium.
All right. Hope everyone can hear me okay. All right, let's go. Let's do it. So, I have a draft and so when I have a draft and I'm ready to finish it or work on it, go to my stories tab and the one I want to work on today is right at the top. It's a product review. Simple, you know, this isn't like a medium announcement here. And there's a couple of things I do or try to make sure that I do is first of all, generally I put a cover image up. So I have one here, put it at the top. Put a caption on it. This is you can see that I'm bald and like a lot of baldies, we have some hair and we think, 'Oh, the most convenient style, most convenient way to maintain it is to keep it closely shaved.' And so this product was sort of a life changer for me. That's not the point of this demo, but it's the point of this post and turned out to be something that a lot of the other baldies I work with don't didn't know about. I didn't know about it until recently and so I thought I should share it with the world.
So, I've got a cover image now. I put a alt text. So, this is for people with screen readers who maybe are vision impaired. It's nice for images to have alt text so that they know what it is even if they can't see it. And then there's a secondary good reason which is a lot of referral traffic to your post comes from Pinterest and a lot of medium readers don't know that. And so it's good to put alt text because it makes it more likely that it'll get picked up.
So then I take my headline and I format it with the big T. I see that there's some white space here. I'll get rid of that. And then I take my subheading and I format it with the little T. The thing to know is that the formatting is a little bit different between a subheading and the actual subtitle. And the difference is if there's any space here. So here we go. This is what I want my title and subtitle to look like. Let's tighten up the formatting, scroll through it. Here's another image that I was showing. I'll put the alt text here. And I'm going to say testimony, another testimonial. Let's shave her from a coworker. The screenshot of something I picked up from Slack. More text and then at the bottom this is some supporting images. And so I'm adding alt text to those as well. The last photo, this is literally you're learning a lot about my hair today but we're supposed to be learning about formatting. So this is the last photo of me with hair. And then this is that I actually ordered this product.
So at that point, I think the post is formatted acceptably from my perspective. And so, I start going through and adding metadata. So, one I wanted to show up in medium topics. So, this is product review. We'll call it. No. bulb, men, what else should I use? gadget, gadgets. Great. That's good enough. You can do up to five. I think these four are probably acceptable here. And then, I almost always publish in a publication, either a private a personal one for myself or someone else's. And so, for today, I actually created a publication and part this post in this publication that I created is meant for a demo of something that's probably launching week after next where submitting the publications will be much smoother, happen in the app rather than if you know the current system, all that stuff happens in like Google Forms and stuff. So, we have a big upgrade to publications and I want to in two weeks demo how much easier it is. And so, the kind of my demo publication, I'm calling it casual product reviews, and I'm going to let people invite people to submit, you know, product reviews just like this one. So, anyways, that's the publication I'm submitting to.
I'm all set. Submit it. I'm setting up to not going to pay you all this one. It's not all about money. Sometimes it's about sharing and making the world better. Submit it to the publication. And at this point, I'm ready to publish at some point. I might hold off because I mean this as a demo for 2 weeks from now, but for now, that is what it looks like to put the finishing touches on a post.
Let me know if you have any comments about that. Okay, great. There are comment questions. Sam S Do you give yourself an amount of time before you hit the publish button? In other words, do you give yourself a buffer zone of rereading? The way I do editing is I just ramp up my pressure and anxiety. So, I would do generally a final pass right now. Then I hit publish and I'd read it one more time. And it's that sort of the anxiety of, 'Oh, shoot, it's live now.' And so usually there's one more set of edits that happens after the publish button goes. And that's my psychological trick. And it's obviously not ideal. Good question.
I guess we're maybe at the end here. Well, thank you for joining me today. I'm going to call it. I appreciated having you. I watched today. Hopefully this is helpful and just also want to appreciate the Medium team for putting this together. All right.
Are there questions at the end? Julie, should I keep going? I might ask I don't know as much about the turnout for the writing challenge. But I do know a little bit about AI writing. I really liked the idea of an AI assistant while I write. Like I don't generate anything. Only once or twice have I ever used AI to make a outline. I mean, I think you know, for me like writing is thinking and I can't outsource that. But sometimes I'll give a little task to an AI. And so I've been using the browser recently which just released and it has a like a chat GPT sidebar. And one of the cool things it did for me in this post that I've been writing is I highlighted a paragraph and I needed to add a citation. It was like the citation and so all I typed was Ev wrote something about this on the Medium blog in 2017. Could you find a link and add it to this paragraph? And then it was like boom, did it. I love that kind of having access to an assistant. So that's an example I guess of how I'm finding ways to have AI help me. Also use it as a thesaurus a lot of times. I'm like I need a word that's kind of like this. And somehow it seems to be able to find the word I'm looking for. Okay. That's it. Calling it. Thank you so much.
