Automatically Posting to dev.to from Ghost

I wouldn't typically bother posting something so short, but this is really more to test how well the syndication works.

I've recently heard of dev.to from my friend Ten. Seemed like a cool place to hang out and I figure I've nothing to lose anyway. So I tried to use the auto syndication feature to port my blog over to dev.to.

This does not just apply to Ghost but any website that supports and rss feed.

Even though I've been using ghost for years, I only learnt today that my blog has an rss feed. To be fair I've always known that platforms provide rss feeds but I've never tried it on my blog. Well, it turns out it's just chaijiaxun.com/rss.

Porting the site over

Syndicating the site is just a matter of going under settings > extensions > Publishing to DEV Community from RSS and filling up the one field. Not having to spend a long time writing scripts felt so great.

Publishing the posts

Yay my posts are all there

Now I feel really dumb having to say this, but in order to publish a post, you need to edit the text of the post. I spent a good 10 minutes searching the website for a publish button.

This is the no frills basic editor. You need to change the false to true to publish the post.

And finally, we're done. Here's my previous post on dev.to. Maybe I'll post to medium next.

Both websites side by side

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Quirks and Caveats

New Posts

You have to set the post on dev.to to published for every new one that's posted. This is a bit of a pain as you have to go into the settings each time.

Updating Posts

Unfortunately, it does not seem like a post is automatically updated if you update it on the main site. But you can just delete it and resyndicate it in the settings and it should reappear as a draft with the new updates. You do lose the unique URL though, so you might end up just editing both posts side by side.

Right now, I just want to say that the old ghost was better when it was all in markdown. It would have been easier to simply copy paste from one to the other.

Editor

The editor on dev.to seems to limit me to only the basic editor for all my imported posts, even though I have my settings on the rich text one. But when I create posts directly in dev.to, I am able to use the rich text editor.

In the picture before this, it is limited to the basic editor and there is no option to set the cover image.

Cover images

The cover image on the ghost blog just appears as a regular image at the top of the post. I have not figured out how to update the cover image without the rich text editor.

Previews

Since there are no cover images, the link previews don't really show the cover image picture. I also don't get to edit the preview excerpt. (Or maybe I do and I haven't figured that out)