
The making of Medium.com - aquid
http://www.teehanlax.com/story/medium/index.html
======
ValentineC
Loved the article, not a fan of the 2.4MB video of hands typing on an Apple
keyboard [1] I was forced to download. I'm just glad I wasn't on a mobile
connection (tethered or otherwise) with a bandwidth cap.

I searched for methods to disable MP4 video downloading on both Chrome and
Firefox, but they don't appear to work (for Firefox, it was about setting
media.autoplay.enabled to false). If anyone knows how I would be able to do
so, I would appreciate learning how to.

[1]
[http://www.teehanlax.com/resources/img/story/medium/header.m...](http://www.teehanlax.com/resources/img/story/medium/header.mp4)
(2.4MB)

~~~
call
The whole damn page is 13 MB. It took over a minute to load on my 1.5mbps
bandwidth-capped WiMax connection. The tab in Chrome is using over 200MB of
memory on my Mac. With chrome using the maximum possible screen real estate, I
can't even read the title on my 1440x900 mbp. <http://cl.ly/PK8o>

A+

~~~
stephengillie
With Javascript off, the tab in Chrome is only taking ~75 MB on my Lenovo.

------
cmelbye
Wow, great article but terribly designed website. Really slow scrolling,
confusing layout, not sure what I could interact with and what I couldn't.
(Some elements used the "pointing hand" cursor yet indicating I could click,
yet did nothing when I clicked.)

~~~
wiremine
I had the completely opposite reaction: I thought it the layout was excellent.
(Although I agree the reaction on the mouse over was confusing).

~~~
markdown
The page is beautiful, but is designed for a very narrow range of computing
devices.

28MB will cost you a fortune on 3g if you don't have a good plan, and the page
will be freeze most devices and be unusable on most of the rest.

Might as well have used Flash.

~~~
colmvp
Teehan + Lax is an interactive design agency that does work for multinational
corporations. Their site is obviously catered towards clients with big wallets
or potential hires. Complaining about bandwidth would make a lot of sense if
we were talking about a site catered towards the majority of internet users,
like an Amazon, Craigslist, or Reddit. It's like complaining that high end
fashion websites don't cater to Internet Explorer 7 when a far greater
majority of their users uses view it through iPads or mobile phones.

~~~
markdown
Have you tried opening the page on a device you consider as worthy of clients
with big wallets?.. say, an iPhone, iPad, or top-of-the-line Android?

It completely crashed Chrome on my iPad 3.

Progressive enhancement is a cornerstone of good web design. There is no
excuse for this.

~~~
swombat
It worked fine on Safari on my iPhone 4S on 3G...

~~~
robryan
Yeah, worked fine on iPhone 5.

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caseyf7
If Medium is the future of publishing, I'm going to need a robot to scroll for
me. That was great, but now I'm tired.

~~~
whostolemyhat
Yep, I could only fit about five sentences on the screen at once. I ended up
zooming out to about 70% to make it more comfortable to read.

------
saeidm
I still like <http://throwww.com> better. I'm only saying that cause I built
Throwww, though.

~~~
robotmay
I had almost this exact same idea last year (a one-off blogging platform). It
wouldn't have looked anywhere near this nice though, good work :)

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markdown
WTF! 28.4 megabytes

[http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dYfjkg/http://www.teehanlax....](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dYfjkg/http://www.teehanlax.com/story/medium/index.html)

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zipop
Medium does not seem to have a way to post from an iPad. It says I have an
unsupported browser. Really, Medium? Or am I missing something?

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NSilver1776
I really like the idea here, the quality of information has been so badly
degraded by spam and status updates that it would be valuable to have a place
for meaningful discussions on abstract ideas.

------
Shamiq
I'm having troubles getting the twitter blurb to load. Any recommendations?
<http://i.imgur.com/h3IshHe.png>

~~~
_yb
<http://www.teehanlax.com/story/medium/> try entering through this, it worked
for me

~~~
Shamiq
Thanks, that works.

------
arkitaip
Very detailed and useful write-up about how actual design work is done in
complex web app projects. Makes me actually want to use Medium.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Medium is not a complex webapp. Facebook or gmail is a complex webapp.

~~~
markdown
Medium is so simple it would be a good candidate for beginner web tutorial
examples: Build a Medium clone in Rails in 4hours.

Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing
because it was made by "web celebrities".

~~~
ianstormtaylor
"Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing
because it was made by "web celebrities"."

This is dumb to the point of annoying. Did you read the article at all? Lots
of great design thinking went into Medium. I'm constantly finding new features
on Medium that are very well thought out.

Yes they have a huge problem of not letting the authors own their own work,
which is why I will never use Medium as-is, but let's not say nothing is
special about it either.

Even if the only thing you want to give them is credit for their beautiful
typography, you have to at least them give them.

~~~
markdown
> let's not say nothing is special about it either.

Now you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say that.

Do you think great writers all over the world would happily give me their
content for free if I designed something better than Medium?

~~~
robryan
Sure, if you generate the same amount of traffic.

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bowerbird
i read this article back when it was first released, but my memory is that the
takeaway message was that if you've got a lot of money to spend on designers,
designers will be quite happy to take it from you. :+)

-bowerbird

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marban
If you guys are interested in a similar tool like medium (without the
network), I'll be launching <http://www.postagon.com> next week.

~~~
msutherl
Yeah, the problem with Medium is that it's beautiful and well designed –
almost perfect, really – but the community is _so_ Silicon Valley. I wouldn't
want my writing associated with that trash.

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ranjez
Its taken twice the time and 10 times the people and budget to build something
half as great as Glipho I guess silicon valley is all about who you know!

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asselinpaul
Wow, impressive story! Thank you

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thoughtcriminal
I personally won't ever use Medium because it deprives the author of branding
and recognition.

~~~
intropic
I wonder what the reasoning was behind branding the author in the URL path as
opposed to as a subdomain. It seems like a very strange approach to take from
guys who have done the latter before.

If nothing else it sure makes posts from Medium very annoying on HN because I
can't actually tell which blogger's post I'm going to read until I click the
link (primarily read on iPad so no hovering).

~~~
Lukeas14
SEO would be one theory. Pages under the same 'www' subdomain will provide a
more positive SEO boost to medium.com than pages under various subdomains.

