Medium is a publishing platform that is utilized by both professional and amateur writers alike. The website has over 170 million readers and is one of the best platforms out there when users want to increase their engagement with their audience base as Medium’s algorithm will try and spread out the user’s work to a newer audience.
As a popular publishing website, there are a lot of posts inside Medium that businesses will find useful to their line of work. There may even be blogs that mention your business or your company’s brand. Manually extracting those blogs may take a long time and a lot of effort though and, if you do gather it slowly, those topics may already be out-of-date by the time you finish.
You would need a web scraping tool to extract data quickly and efficiently while also pairing it with a Medium proxy so that you won’t get banned and blacklisted while using the web scraper. Most websites have strict restrictions against the use of bots and a Medium proxy will allow you to bypass those restrictions and avoid getting banned.
Let’s set up a Medium proxy server.
For Windows:
To set up proxies in Windows, simply search for “Proxy Settings” in your windows search bar and open the search result.
You are then given two options to choose from: Automatic proxy setup or Manual proxy setup. If you want windows to automatically detect your proxy settings, choose the first option. Choose the second option if you want to utilize a specific ip address and port number.
If you chose the first option, then:
- Turn on Automatically detect Settings
- Turn on Use setup script
- Enter the script address
- Click Save
If you chose the second option, then:
- Turn on Use a proxy server
- Input both server address and port number
- If you have any addresses you would like to visit without a proxy, enter them here
- Turn on Don’t use the proxy server for local addresses check box if you want to access a local server without a proxy
- Click Save
Image Alt Text: Windows Automatic Proxy Setup
For Mac:
To start configuring your proxy settings in MacOS, simply:
Step 1. Click on the Apple Icon.
Step 2. On the drop down menu, click on “System Preferences”.
Step 3. Click on “Network”
Step 4. Click on “Advanced”
Note: Make sure to connect to your wi-fi first.
Step 5. Click on “Proxies”
This should then redirect you to MacOS proxy settings. MacOS is more straightforward compared to windows. You only have one option which is to manually configure your proxy server.
Here are the steps to follow:
- Select which proxy IP protocol you want to configure. This depends on which protocols your proxy service provider offers.
- Turn on Secure Web Proxy
- Input the Proxy Server Address and Port Number
- Click OK to save the configurations
Note: You may be prompted for your Mac user password to save your settings.
Image Alt Text: Configuring MacOS Proxy Settings
Congratulations! You have now finished configuring a Medium proxy server.
