One Scenario Where The Medium.com Import Tool Fails

 |  Medium.com

Some missing metadata on your site could be the cause of not being able to import your story into medium.com.

For the last few hours, I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to understand why the Import Tool on medium.com wasn’t working for an article on my blog.

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After much trial and error, it turned out that adding the Open Graph protocol metadata og:type resolved my issue.

The fix

The changes I made were to first register the Open Graph prefix of og: by adding the prefix attribute to my <html> tag.

<html lang="en" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">

Then within the <head> tag, I ensured the og:type metadata was set along with og:title and og:description.

<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:title" content="...">
<meta property="og:description" content="...">

After these changes, the Import Tool worked fine. I hope this information might help prevent someone else from the same headache I’ve had with this issue!

Other known causes

If you have a web page that uses client-side JavaScript to generate your markdown and content, it’s unlikely the Import Tool will work on your page.