Case Study: Use Selenium To Extract A List of Published Medium Article Titles

A helpful utility for high-volume Medium bloggers

Medium authors know that only 20~25 stories (under ‘Drafts’ and ‘Published’) are displayed on your page. When you scroll down to the bottom, 20 or so more stories, will load. This is known as lazy loading (or progressive loading).

For high-volume Medium bloggers, who have hundreds of stories under ‘Published’ and ‘Drafts’, finding a specific article is quite time-consuming. My father asked me to write a simple Selenium utility to help.

My father has over 600+ drafts

I already wrote an article, “Automated Testing Elements on a Lazy Load Page with Selenium WebDriver”, to show how to automate lazy loading pages in Selenium WebDriver. Let’s put it into practice.

Test Design

1. Login to Medium account, pass authentication manually
   It is not a good idea to store user name and passwords in your scripts. For this utility, I can use TestWise’s attaching-session feature to by-pass authentication manually.
2. Keep scrolling down until reaching the end.
   For this, scroll to a big…