Medium Scraper - Posts by Author, Tag & New-Post Monitor

Get the latest Medium posts of any author, publication or tag as clean rows, and let the Actor remember what it already gave you: with monitoring on, a scheduled run returns only the posts that are new since the last run. No login, no API key, no browser.

Use it to follow competitors' engineering blogs, the writers in your industry or a topic tag every day, and send only the new posts to a newsletter, a research sheet, a Slack channel or a sales team.

What you get

One row per post:

Field	What it is
sourceType, sourceName	What the feed says it is: author (@ev), publication (netflixtechblog.com, the-ascent) or tag (programming)
title, author	Post title and the author name shown by Medium
publishedAt, updatedAt	ISO 8601, UTC
postUrl	Link to the post, without Medium's ?source=rss... tracking value
tags	The post's tags (up to five)
summary, summaryFrom	Medium's own short summary when the feed has one (feed-snippet), otherwise the first 300 characters of the text (content-start)
contentInFeed, contentLength, wordCount	Whether the feed carries the full text, and its length in characters and words
contentText / contentHtml	The text itself - only when you ask for it (includeContent) and only when the feed carries it
imageUrl	First image of the post, when there is one
postId	Medium's post ID (the same post has the same ID in every feed)
change, isFirstCheck, previousCheckedAt	Monitoring mode: first-check or new-post, and when the source was last checked
feedTitle, feedUrl, input, scrapedAt	Which feed the row came from and which input line asked for it

Claps, responses and reading time are not in Medium's feeds, so they are not in the rows. Nothing is estimated.

Input

{
    "authors": ["@ev"],
    "publications": ["https://netflixtechblog.com", "better-programming"],
    "tags": ["programming", "machine learning"],
    "monitoringMode": true
}

• authors - @name, name, or a profile link.
• publications - the name in medium.com/<name>, a link, or the publication's own domain.
• tags - a word or phrase (machine learning is read as machine-learning), or a tag link.
• maxPostsPerSource - newest first, default 10.
• postedAfter - optional date; older posts are left out.
• includeContent - none (default), text or html.
• monitoringMode, resetMonitoringState - see below. resetMonitoringState forgets everything remembered for this Actor on your account, so the next run starts over (and charges for the starting posts again).

Monitoring mode: only new posts

1. The first run for a source returns its latest posts once and remembers them (change: "first-check").
2. Every later run returns only posts that were not there before (change: "new-post").
3. A source with nothing new returns no row and is charged one small check. If nothing is new anywhere, the run ends with a single no-new-posts row that is not charged.

Sources are remembered one by one, so you can add or remove lines without the others starting over. An author given once as @ev and once as https://ev.medium.com is the same source. A post that shows up in two of your sources in the same run (an author you follow, writing under a tag you follow) is returned once.

Schedule the Actor (for example hourly or daily) and connect the dataset to your tool of choice; each run's dataset then holds just the new posts.

Limits you should know

• A Medium feed holds only the latest 10 posts and has no second page. This Actor returns up to 10 posts per author, publication or tag per run. It cannot go back in time.
• In monitoring mode, a source that publishes more than 10 posts between two runs loses the ones in between. Authors and most publications are fine with a daily run. Popular tags publish 10 posts within minutes: a tag monitor is a sample of the tag, not a complete record. When every post in a feed is new, the run adds a possible-gap row (not charged) so that you can see it.
• Text is included only when Medium puts it in the feed. Tag feeds carry a short summary only. Author and publication feeds often carry the full text, but not for every post. The Actor never opens the post page, does not log in and does not go around the member paywall, so a post whose text is not in the feed has contentInFeed: false and no text. The feed does not say whether a post is member-only, so there is no such field.
• A tag that does not exist looks like a tag with no posts. Medium answers both with an empty feed; you get a no-posts row that is not charged.
• Tag feeds list posts by publication time; a post that gets a tag added later may not show up.
• Runs are polite: one request at a time, two seconds apart. If Medium refuses a request or shows a verification page, the run stops and tells you which lines were not read; it does not retry through other connections.

Rows that are not posts (never charged)

status	Meaning
no-such-source	Medium has no author or publication under this name (HTTP 404)
not-a-medium-feed	The address is not a Medium publication
feed-mismatch	The feed that came back names a different author or tag than the one you asked for
no-posts	The feed was read and has nothing to return
no-new-posts	Monitoring: nothing new in any source
possible-gap	Monitoring: all 10 posts in a feed were new, so some may have been missed
duplicate-input	The same source was given twice
invalid-input	A line that is not an author, publication or tag
robots-disallowed, blocked, unreadable	The feed was not requested or could not be read, with the reason
budget-reached, not-read	The run's maximum charge was reached; lists what was left out

Pricing

Pay per event, no start fee and no monthly fee:

• post-returned - one per post row.
• source-checked - monitoring mode only: one per source that was read on a later run and had no new post.

Rows that are not posts are free. A run never charges more than the maximum total charge you set for it.

How it works

For each line the Actor reads the host's robots.txt (the rules for all crawlers) and then one public RSS feed: medium.com/feed/@name, medium.com/feed/<publication>, medium.com/feed/tag/<tag>, or <own domain>/feed. It checks that the feed says it is generated by Medium and that it names the author or tag you asked for. It does not use Medium search, trending pages, post pages or any private API.

This Actor is not affiliated with Medium. It reads public feeds only. The posts belong to their authors: use the rows to find and link to posts, and respect each author's rights before republishing text.

Related

• Substack Posts Monitor - the same idea for Substack publications: post list with likes and comments, and only-new-posts monitoring.

Thanks for using this Actor

We build these tools for people who run them every day, and we improve them from what users tell us.

• Missing a field, or need another filter? Tell us in the Issues tab. If the data is there, we add it.
• Found a bug or a wrong value? Post the run ID in the Issues tab. Wrong data is the thing we fix first.

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