Create a static mirror of your DEV blog

I started using DEV at the suggestion of Perl Weekly, and I was quite pleased with it - until I discovered that links to dev.to are effectively "shadowbanned" on several major platforms (Reddit, Hacker News, etc.). Posts containing DEV URLs would simply not be shown to users, making it impossible to share content effectively.

To work around this, I thought I would need a way to publish my DEV articles on my own domain so I could freely share them. There are some DEV tutorials out there that explain how to consume the API using frontend frameworks like React, however I don't enjoy frontend at all and I did not want to spend much time on that.

My solution was to get a simple Perl script that builds static versions of the articles, along with an index page. A Perl 5 script will run anywhere, including an old shared linux hosting account I still keep on IONOS, and I really like the speed of static sites.

I thought this is an ideal task to start with ChatGPT. Indeed, after 10-15 mins in a few prompts I had a sort-of working solution without having to open up the API documentation, nor writing any CSS. I then spent an hour or two fixing bugs, refactoring some of the ancient-looking code and tweaking / adding features (e.g. tag index pages) - tasks that I enjoy.

Here is the result. You can find the Perl script and assets in this repo.

It will run on pretty much any Perl 5 version (tested down to 5.10) with some basic CPAN modules (LWP::UserAgent, JSON, Path::Tiny).

To use it, check the project out from the repo and change 2 lines in dev_to_static.pl with your username and your desired blog name:

my $username = 'your_dev_to_username';
my $blogname = "your_blog_name";

Generate the static site to a target_directory:

perl dev_to_static.pl target_directory

You can run it on your web host, or run locally and copy the resulting directory to your host.

A nightly cron can update the site with new articles.

Comments

[Gabor Szabo]

You might also want to set the canonical_url on DEV to point to the article on your site.

[Dimitrios Kechagias]

I intentionally go the other way around. I like to post on DEV, I do not want to have to maintain a CMS myself, so the mirror is only for sharing in places DEV is not welcome. In fact, if my topic is Perl, I make a blogs.perl post as well and have that be the canonical_url here. The static mirror sets the canonical to whatever DEV lists (so it's either dev.to or blogs.perl in my case).