DEV Community

How to Write Your First Post on DEV

Chris Achard on September 05, 2019

So you've been reading dev.to and you're ready to post. Great! Here's how to do that, and what to expect next: 0. Sign Up If you don'...

Read full post

K • Sep 6 '19

Also:

Write about anything you like, it doesn't have to be mega complicated or technical.

There are more beginners out there than you think. Many people are a few steps behind you and happy to read what helped you to understand things.

Chris Achard • Sep 6 '19

YES! Absolutely

Emmanuel Eneche • Feb 19

Absolutely got this ❤️

faizelGaroeb • Jan 10 '22

Awesome comment dude!

Maxime • Sep 6 '19

You can also enjoy the power of GIT to have versions on your posts, Prettier to format your Markdown post, Github so that people can fix your posts by making a PR and many more by using my-dev-to template 😊 dev.to/maxime1992/manage-your-dev-...

Michael Tharrington • Mar 16 '20

Chris, I can't tell you how many people I've pointed here to use this tutorial. Thank you for writing such handy documentation! 😀

By the way, would it be cool with you if we add the tag #meta to this?

Chris Achard • Mar 16 '20

Awesome! And sure :)

Nayden Gochev • Nov 6 '19

Nice post,
however to me it is not clear how to add highlight for the code template ?

By default in Markdown you can write with 3 ` the begining of a code block and the end with 3 ` however also at the beginning you can write the language for highlight which doesnt seems to work.

Example of markdown with highlight not in dev.to but in general :

```javascript
console.log("this should be highlighted with javascript but this is not the case);
```

So can you explain how to paste a code block WITH a highlight intext in the post.

Chris Achard • Nov 6 '19 • Edited

... oh weird! I just wrote this comment about how it should work, but then it didn't for me... I'm looking into it; not sure what's going on

Chris Achard • Nov 6 '19

Ah! Got it - if I have a backtick (just a single one) in the post like you do BEFORE the three backticks, then the parser gets confused... try just doing threebackticks with the "javascript" and it should show up like this:

console.log("this should be highlighted with javascript but this is not the case);

Does that work for you?

Nayden Gochev • Nov 6 '19 • Edited

We should add this to the markdown ? btw when writing post :))

Sometimes it looks it doesnt work .. its weird but now it works.. :) weird !

```javascript
console.log("no color");
```

now in the post I have `*3 times but here bellow when trying I am typing just 3 times without SPACES and I got it !

console.log("test JavaScript");

weird why it wasn't working above.

System.out.println("test again Java ");

Console.WriteLine("whoo c# has to be lowercase c");

AYUSH GUPTA • Apr 14 '20 • Edited

Thanks for the tutorial Chris.

Note; I published my first post here but I noticed that my article contains noindex/nofollow tags. Not sure why so?

Anyways I think my article is visible to dev community members. :)

Chris Achard • Apr 14 '20

Glad it helped!

Hm; not sure about the noindex/nofollow - (would be a question for the DEV team perhaps).

dillan teagle • Oct 20 '19

How can you add a drscription for your post?

Chris Achard • Oct 20 '19

What type of description are you looking to add? I only know about the title and tags; plus you can add a cover image that will show up on twitter, etc.

Some of the "descriptions" you see might just be the first few lines of the post?

dillan teagle • Oct 20 '19 • Edited

Hmm well i am talking about this key "description"

:
canonical_url: "https://dev.to/teaglebuilt/is-ruby-dead-17em"
collection_id: null
comments_count: 14
cover_image: null
description: ""
flare_tag: {name: "discuss", bg_color_hex: "#000000", text_color_hex: "#FFFFFF"}
id: 174966
path: "/teaglebuilt/is-ruby-dead-17em"
positive_reactions_count: 9
published_at: "2019-09-22T14:19:40.527Z"
published_timestamp: "2019-09-22T14:19:40Z"
slug: "is-ruby-dead-17em"
tag_list: (3) ["ruby", "rails", "discuss"]
title: "Is ruby dead?"
type_of: "article"
url: "https://dev.to/teaglebuilt/is-ruby-dead-17em"

curious as of how it can be filled?

Chris Achard • Oct 20 '19

Huh! Not sure actually :) @ben might know maybe? (don't know if @ mentions work here)

MeStrak • Aug 21 '20 • Edited

I know this post is quite old but I just had the same question.

If you don't do anything then it just takes the first few lines of your article by default. If you want to set a custom description then there are two options that I could find. Option 1 seems much better to me.

Remove the ' before the --- below, I just added it before the --- to stop markdown reformatting it.

Add a frontmatter section containing a description field to the top of the article (it will only be visible in edit mode):
'---
description: A great article about how to set the description of an article on dev.to
'---
Change the editor to basic markdown on this page: dev.to/settings/ux. When you do that new posts will have this at the top when in edit mode. However then you have other things that you need to set manually that you :
'---
title:
published: false
description:
tags:
//cover_image: direct_url_to_image.jpg
'---

After setting that description field I see the custom description in the API.

Rose Day • Mar 28 '20

Thank you so much for this post! I have been on Dev for a long while but not until this post did I realize there was an image button at the bottom as an option to add in an image.

Lee Warrick • Sep 6 '19 • Edited

Most importantly... Just post it

Chris Achard • Sep 6 '19

Definitely! DEV's a great place to post, even if you're nervous - so just post it :)

Comment deleted

Chris Achard • Sep 6 '19

Thanks Dandy :) I've had a few beginners actually ask me about it, which is why I made the post! - So yes, it's pretty straightforward, but still can be daunting if you haven't written a post before 😀

PatrickServ.. • Sep 6 '19

Can't see the 'Write a Post' section ???

Chris Achard • Sep 6 '19

Do you mean you can't see the "write a post" button in the navbar? There's also a "write a post" link if you hover over your profile picture in the upper right... does that work?