Scheduled Posts
It is a Friday and I have finished writing the week's segment of 📚 Awesome links from dev.to and around the web. I'm done revising and saved the draft and everything is ready to go.
Now Saturday comes, when it is scheduled to go live to all the amazing folk on on this platform. I'm full of excitement and I'm ready to hit the publish button, but alas there is no electricity and no internet connectivity (💡 Fun fact: electicity is not available from 5am to 9pm, here in Zimbabwe, everyday, but randomly comes back during the day, during weekends).
My heart sinks in despair - "But I promised these people I would deliver them awesome curated links every Saturday, how am I going to do that now 😭", I say to myself.
And then a bright idea strikes my mind 🤯, the week's segment is finished and ready to go, it's already on the DEV servers, so what if there was a way I could have scheduled the post to be automatically submitted on a specific time that would have saved me so much headache.
Post templates/Ability to clone Posts
For the past 5 weeks I have been religiously posting curated links of interesting things I have found around the web under the series 📚 Awesome links from dev.to and around the web every Saturday.
The first three posts I would hand craft every heading and structure of the Post. But after that I realized I was repeating myself so much so I made a draft post that served as a template (The draft template, if you are interested in seeing it).
Now things became a lot easier. Every time I would create a new segment, I would simply copy all the text in the draft post into the new one and walaah it all works magically. Until one day I forgot to enter the series name (I am using Version 2 of the editor), which I discovered on a Monday that there was this segment of the series, just floating alone and not connected to it's related posts.
I quickly fixed it, and that got me thinking again, what if there was a way to clone an existing post, with all of its metadata, in a single click, wouldn't that be awesome?
Conclusion
So yeah these are the 2 features that i think would really improve my workflow on the DEV platform. They may not be applicable to everyone but I'm sure there's a certain group of DEVers who would be interested. I'm still leveling up my rails skills, and at this point I do not think I have the competency to implement this so this is a cry for help to anyone interested in making this happen
Cheers 🥂
@kudapara
Top comments (2)
I think scheduled posts is a nice and theoretically easy feature to implement, but personally I see it as completely unimportant. That's not because I wouldn't use it myself, it's because I don't get why anyone would.
People aren't coming here thinking, "oh, it's Thursday at 4AM, that's when Jo Bloggs' CSS posts come out" (because Jo lives in a different timezone). People follow topics and see posts the next time they open up the site. Readers don't schedule when they see content, so it makes no sense to me that writers should need to in an asynchronous medium like the Internet.
I also don't really get post templates. If your posts are so similar that they benefit from copying and pasting large chunks, doesn't that mean they're largely redundant? If instead, you want to follow a layout like "heading here, summary here", you can keep such a template in anything you like - save it in a text file if you want, make a draft post here that you never publish if you want, and then use copy-paste to do-the-do.
I suppose I sound a bit negative, but I'm trying to say that these are problems the world has already solved with tools we all have at hand already. Why have them built-in to a platform when that means that you need to learn a different process for every new site you use?
While it would be nice to have built into the platform, you might be interested in this post/service:
PublishTo.Dev: Scheduling article publishing on dev.to
Todd Anglin ・ Jul 30 ・ 5 min read