Republishing blogposts on dev.to

I had my weblog for years at https://weblogs.asp.net/soever, and then decided to move over to Medium at https://medium.com/@svdoever. Like many bloggers I was not happy with the way Medium treats it’s readers. I decided to move over to my own Markdown blogging platform on https://www.sergevandenoever.nl, and it works great! I use a Gatsby based system of static site generation: commit changes to my Github based repository and stuff gets published.

The only problem is that I have almost no readers. I put a lot of work in research and writing my blog posts, so have the hope that more people could be interested in them. I came across the post The Results of Four Weeks of Cross-Posting to Dev.To so I decide to give it a try.

Here are the steps I take for cross-posting from a Markdown blog to https://dev.to:

1. Create a new post on https://dev.to by pressing the WRITE A POST and copy over the Markdown
2. Upload all images linked into your blog to https://dev.to by clicking the image button and click Choose Files under Body Images. Select all your images of your original blog post at once. You are then provided a text area with all Direct URLs. https://dev.to rewrites the names of your images, so it is difficult to correlate the new urls to your original images.
3. Copy this list of image urls into a new file in Visual Studio Code, and set the format of the file to Markdown in the bottom-right of Visual Studio Code. Now press the Markdown preview button.
4. Press Ctrl-H to do replacements on the file and select the right option for regular expressions. In the top field type ^(.*)$ and in the bottom field type $1\n![]($1)<hr/>. Now select replace all ocurrences. This will result in the following:
5. Put your original post next to the post in the https://dev.to edit window and replace all old image urls to the new image urls created by https://dev.to as can be seen in the Markdown preview in Visual Studio code where you have the new url with the corresponding image.
6. Press the ”…” button and set the Canonical URL to the url of your original blog post, and add a series name if relevant.
7. If your post is correct in the preview press publish!

It would be great if https://dev.to would provide and api to automate the above tasks but this approach works good enough to get your cross-posting done!

Personal blog by Serge van den Oever - als je maar lol hebt...
X: @svdoever
LinkedIn: Serge van den Oever - articles on LinkedIn
GitHub: svdoever

Technology Consultant @ Macaw
2021-2024 Sitecore Technology MVP