I use Github to store the code that I write, and Github Actions to automate my workflows. My blog is hosted on a number of platforms including Dev.to, which accepts markdown as an input format and has an api.
If I could store my blog in Github, I could do the following
- Write blog articles off line and use git to keep them upto date.
- Push completed articles to Github.
- Take advantage of Github Actions to:
- Publish to various blogging platforms
- Grammar and spell check
- Generate and store diagrams
- Inform social media platforms of new/updated articles
- Display latest articles on my Github profile.
Publishing to Dev.to
A quick search of the Github marketplace found Publish to dev.to maintained and owned by sinedied which seems to fit my needs.
After following the config steps for this action, I was able to see articles being published to my blog. The default config worked fine for the way I work, which is to always create a Pull Request before I merge to main.
Generating Diagrams
Mermaid.js seemed like the obvious choice as it integrates with Markdown and Github, and importantly has a commnand line interface, which means it can be used in a workflow file.
Any generated images can use the github raw urls, so a bit of sed magic will convert the local urls that mermaid generates into a full url. N.b to take advantage of Github as a hosting service, the repo will have to be set as public otherwise, there will be a need to play with tokens and their expiry. I will write about how the repo is secured in another post.
I will also need ot consider how the generated images are added to the repo.
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