When I was publishing my Integrating Frontend with Backend series, I published some of my articles out of order. Unfortunately, Medium does not offer a way for me to rearrange my articles or edit their dates, so they’re stuck like that forever.
Luckily, there is a way to create an entirely new post, but with it’s date set at a previous one. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to “backdate” your Medium articles so that you can publish your articles back in time.
Backdating Your Medium Articles
- Create a GitHub.com account if you don’t have one already: https://github.com/signup
- Go to this GitHub repository which I’ve setup for you: https://github.com/kevinMEH/medium-import
- Press the star button to star the repository:
- Then, press the fork icon to fork the repository.
- Press “Create fork”:
- Determine the date and time you’d like your article to be published on. Convert that date and time into the ISO 8601 time format.
- You can use this site here: scroll down to the UTC or Your Time Zone section, and put in the desired date and time. It will then convert the desired time into the ISO 8601 format. Any other site is fine as long as it gives the correct format.
- Go inside
backdate.htmlin your forked repository by pressing the file entry:
- Press the pencil icon on the top left to edit the file:
- At the top of the page, inside the <head> tag, you’ll find a <meta> tag with a “content” attribute. Replace the placeholder time inside the
contentattribute with the time you found in step 2.
- Setup GitHub pages for your repository, so that we can access the HTML page on the internet: Go to Settings > Pages, then in the “Branch” section, select
main, and press Save.
- Wait a few minutes for GitHub pages to build and be setup, and then access your page by going to https://[username].github.io/medium-import/backdate.html
- (Replace [username] with your GitHub username. If you’ve changed the name of the repository, you’ll have to change “medium-import” as well.)
- Go to your stories page on Medium. Click Import a story. Enter in the link for your backdate.html page, and click Import.
- Note: If you do this multiple times, you may notice that sometimes your GitHub pages hasn’t updated to the version with the newest timestamp. If this happens, please wait a few minutes for GitHub pages to finish updating.
- Worse case scenario: GitHub pages never updates. In this case, try editing the file again and also renaming the file in the top left corner to a new name. Then, wait a few minutes, and access the new file at https://[username].github.io/medium-import/[new_file_name] , replacing [new_file_name] with the name of the renamed file.
🎉 And that’s it! You’ve just backdated a Medium post. If you enjoyed this tutorial, feel free to drop me a follow on here or on GitHub.
Have fun!
