How to Backdate Medium Posts via Wordpress

Back in the day, I used to write a regular column for the Columbia Daily Tribune in my hometown of Columbia Missouri. That paper has since been purchased by Gatehouse media which and abandoned its historic archive of articles (To be frank, it often can’t keep its current articles linked correctly).

I did some of my best work then and I still want to be able share my articles with colleagues via Medium. While I could copy and paste them directly into Medium and publish them, I wanted to be able to have the publication correct date and a link to the original source. I found this is easy to do if you happen to have access to a self hosted WordPress site (Note: This might work on a wordpress.com site, but I have not tried it).

The steps are straight forward.

Step 1: Create a new WordPress Post with the article that you want to import.

Step 2: Add a new “custom HTML block” to the article (Top, bottom or in the middle, it doesn’t matter; I put mine at the top).

Step 3: In that block paste the following:

<time datetime=2006–10–03 23:00:00 +0530" class=”published”> October 3…