With a little help of an easy to use Python script…
The topics your Medium story was curated into are easy to find when you know where to look. Zulie Rane wrote an excellent story¹ explaining the steps to find these topics manually. In this story I describe how automate these steps.
Prerequisite
We will use the programming language Python to make a little script to automagically return the topics your story was curated into. So make sure you have Python installed on your laptop. If it isn’t preinstalled you can download and install it from python.org.
Script
The script to automate the process of finding the topics for your story is just a few lines of code. I tried to keep things as easy and terse as possible.
import requests, sysdef main(url):
topics = requests.get(url).text.split('Topic:')
if len(topics) > 1:
print([topic.split('"')[0] for topic in topics[1:]])
else:
print('-') # no topics foundif __name__ == "__main__":
main(sys.argv[1])
Save this script to a plain text file and use .py as file extension. I chose topics.py as file name for this demo.
Demo
Running the script is pretty straightforward. It only needs the URL of your story as argument. Run the command below from a terminal or command prompt.
python3 topics.py <url>Replace the text <url> with the URL of your story on Medium and you are good to go. And as you can see, the topics the story as curated into are automagically returned.
For example, my first story² on Medium was curated into the topics Data Science and Programming.
Final Thoughts
It’s pretty easy to modify the script to return other information as well like publication date, publisher and tags. Hope this was helpful. Let me know your thoughts.
Footnotes
[1]: Zulie Rane (November 8, 2020): How to Tell What Topics Your Medium Story Was Curated Into.
[2]: René (December 7, 2020): Getting Started with Data Analysis in Julia.
