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😁12 things you didn't know you could do with DEV

Anmol Baranwal on January 30, 2024

As a developer, I'm always looking for those little details because, well, the details matter. We're all part of one big community here on DEV, a...
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Anmol Baranwal

As an author, I've wanted to share this for a long time.
I believe people need to have fun, go deep, and find these small details about DEV.

Telling you the truth, I began my writing journey on DEV and never wrote on Hashnode or Medium before DEV. I'm not a fan of Medium because of the paywall, and Hashnode seems challenging for beginners.

I only want people to read my content and enjoy it.
See you later. Hope you like it!

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Ben Sinclair

I didn't know about the Software Comparisons page or the CTA tag! How did you find out about them?

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Yeah CTA isn't mentionned on comments sections with buttons or documentation.

But one post about that, a post from the DEV Team - @michaeltharrington

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Michael Tharrington

Oooo yeah, thanks for bringing this one up, Thomas. And that makes me realize that I need to make this series a bit easier to access!

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Anmol Baranwal

I struggled a bit to make it work since I wasn't very familiar with liquid tags.
Thanks for sharing the post! :D

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Anmol Baranwal

LOL! I blackmailed the DEV Team. Just kidding!
As I mentioned, I explore in-depth. It's a habit as a developer.

I didn't share some generic things since it's not that useful. There is a whole lot more!

first line

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Ndeye Fatou Diop

Wouaw! Thanks for this great list! I have been using dev.to lately and some of these stuff will come handy

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Anmol Baranwal

Thanks so much for commenting! I'm really glad this was helpful :)

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Ndeye Fatou Diop

Something I also wonder: is there a way to have a default footer for all blog posts ? Or to save a snippet of text and re-use ?

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Anmol Baranwal

As far as I know, I don't think there is.
Usually, I copy-paste it from the last blog.
If you want, I can ask in the DEV discord community, and if they like it, the team might consider it.

Having snippets would be great!

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Ndeye Fatou Diop

Thanks ! That would be great !

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Ben Sinclair

You mean like a signature on an email or an old-style forum?

I think it's probably not a good idea; people are generally negative towards signatures because in those old enviroments they tended to fill up your feed with repetetive fluff. That shouldn't happen on DEV since you only read one post at a time and the feed only contains a snippet, but generally speaking I think signatures have baggage. They might also feel like too much self-promotion, especially if you see the same ones again and again.

There's nothing stopping you pasting the same content into multiple posts yourself, of course, but I think they'd mostly get used for "follow me on $platform" and "buy me an lemonade shandy" links, and we already have the ability to set social media links against your profile. Perhaps a solution which covers that would be a new feature to allow users to set which links/buttons appear in the little popover you see when you hover over their name?

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Anmol Baranwal

If you've used GitHub, you would know how they provide templates for basic things. You can use a slash (/) to create a table with different rows and columns, and then you can customize it.

In DEV, I have to rewrite the structure, which can be frustrating. So, having some small snippets could be useful. For instance, the snippet to create a line break within bullet points.

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Ndeye Fatou Diop

Thanks for taking the time to write such a complete response.
I understand the rational : it’s mostly used for linking to other social media’s but also suggesting the user to comment/like, etc. I have been copy/pasting the text and it looks like a lot of bloggers here do it too. So maybe it’s worth adding ? If not, the popover would be great indeed !!!

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Rachel Fazio

I LOVE this. Also (if no one has already shared) we have a new badge page that is more organized and helps ya see which badges you can earn now in our community vs. which ones are our past badges vs. language specific badges!

Here's that link for ya: dev.to/community-badges

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Anmol Baranwal

DEV is full of surprises! 😄

And here I thought there wouldn't be anything new.
I can't believe how many things are there that I don't know about on DEV. LOL!

Thanks a bunch for sharing this :D
I would have included it in the post if I had known this earlier.

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Ricardo Esteves

Wow thank you for this info! Supaaa handy. 👌

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Anmol Baranwal

Thanks so much!
Even I wasn't aware of a few things, especially that button.

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Ricardo Esteves • Edited

After your post I discovered this link: This one 🤛

Also have nice suggestions.

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Mihnea Simian

DEV Community Caption Contest - wait, what contest? :D

I answered some "Caption This!" posts with, what I thought, were cracking captions, but gave up since there isn't much action over there.

Thanks for the list! Finally a useful listicle.

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Anmol Baranwal

As I said, DEV team is trying to hide lots of things 🤣
I need that badge even though I can't crack good jokes. LOL!
I'm really happy that you found this article useful. :D

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Unnati Agarwal

I joined DEV today and had previously not used any writing platforms such as Medium or Hashnode. This post has really helped me get started.

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Anmol Baranwal

Woah!
Welcome to the community :D

I'm glad it was helpful.
If you have any more questions, feel free to let me know, I'll be happy to help you anytime :)

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Unnati Agarwal

Sure! Want to start for real but not getting motivation. Can you let me know more about the content type people usually share on DEV.

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Anmol Baranwal

You can check out the Top 7 Posts of the last week. As you can see, the content is very different from each author.

While people typically share technical content, you can share whatever you like.

Whether it's tutorials, tips, career advice, technical content, real-life experiences, to lively discussions. It depends on you where you can provide the maximum value :)

Starting is the main thing, just do it and eventually you will learn and grow by improving through feedback and structure.
I'd love to read it!

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Unnati Agarwal

Thank you so much. Will be posting soon!

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Awesome. Just awesome.

You demonstrated all capacities of Forem/DEV, showed the part of Web Monetization and the POWER of RSS feeds. ✨💜

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Anmol Baranwal

I wasn't going to include it since Coil discontinued their services. 🤣
But there are more payment providers, so I thought it was worth adding.

RSS feeds want some "feed"-back humor!
It is actually a handy feature, and can save a lot of trouble.

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BeacampHQ

I didn't know some of these, thank you for sharing.

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Dmytro Klimenko

when I got to the point that tags are a very important part, my life changed for the better

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Anmol Baranwal

Yeah! Tags are indeed important because everyone has their own set of reading preferences.
DEV actually helps in that, and we can discover content that aligns with our interests more easily.

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Karen Payne

Great post, thanks.

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