Delivering quality articles might take days or even weeks of work, meaning you gonna deal with lots of work in your Drafts.
Where do you write your DEV drafts?
- Do you save them directly here on DEV dashboard?
- Do you prefer to use cloud based apps like Notion and Evernote for better access and organization?
- Maybe you use some standalone apps, for example, markdown editors like Typora or Caret and the organize your drafts locally?
- Do you prefer to write markdown directly in your VS Code and then use the power of Git extensions to push them to Github?
- Or maybe you are type of person who likes to keep pen and notebook around you all day, so you can take sketches with no limits?
Top comments (39)
I use VS Code with the DEV Community extension. Allows you to easily create new posts and saves them immediately to the DEV dashboard, then you can just edit it in VS Code and preview it with the Markdown previewer right in there, or just switch to the dashboard for a full preview (including liquid tags and such).
That seems super cool! Unfortunately, it does not seem to work at my end, I'm getting an
Unexpected end of JSON inputerror. Probably some of my existing posts' title or content is breaking the JSON and the extension is failing.I have a similar issue when trying to save sometimes, it mainly happened when I use too many tags (max. 4). It's very possible that it also fails at other times though 🤷♂️
God... I am so grateful you shared that!! Oh, and I am using npp or vscode (lately).
Thank you for sharing that extension 🙏❤
Workflow idea looks promising 😉
(Like a lot of others in the comments here) I use Notion 😄 It's easy to transfer the draft from there to DEV, and while I'm still getting a rough draft down, I find Notion really easy to quickly pop into and jot down some thoughts/tweaks even if I'm on mobile.
Also at this point a lot of my life is in Notion 😂, so it's nice to keep everything all together. Interesting reading what other folks are using!
When I'm using the web version of Notion, the only downside would be a slow initial start-up time 😉 All those awesome features take some time to load, I guess 😉
Agree 100% - I have it open a lot and sometimes forget just how slow it can be to start up otherwise. I tried the android app for a while too and found that way worse, so now I just use the web version always!
It might be intimidating at times, those 4-5 secs might feel like an eternity when an awesome idea strikes, but you have nowhere to write it down and have to wait 😄😄
Maybe a good opportunity for me to reflect on "is this actually a good idea 🤔" 😂
Hahah, yeah 😄 Or sometimes it's enough to lose the train of thought 😂😂
I used to use dropbox's Paper for all blogging drafts. I now use Notion since my company uses it and I really enjoy it. Both have good MD export.
If you write anything that needs quite some writing, an app of this sort will be quite a life saver. I would look for something as barebone as possible (e.g. not Gdocs !) and with good md export.
Notion is awesome, agree on all 💯
Drafts? Just type and ship!
Actually, most of mine are cross-posts from my blog, and when I want to bring them across I copy, paste, and publish. I sometimes save a few cross-posts directly within DEV, but haven't for a while.
If I was thinking of writing directly here and exclusively here, I'd save them directly in DEV because I can write them as markup from the start.
I use typora.io/ for all my blog posts. They are written in Markdown so I can post them everywhere. Plus that gives me a local backup for all of my blog posts.
Hold on... I've maybe seen this
typorasomewhere that similar and familiar a very long time ago. I don't know, maybe a placebo effect in between my eyes and the mind.Maybe. There are another two markdown apps that I also have but I don't use them as much which is why I did not mention them because I am so used to Typora. They are notable.app/ and obsidian.md/.
None of them have official mobile versions yet so if I want to view my markdown files on mobile I use 1writerapp.com/. It's a great setup because it means that I have control over my own data which I can access from a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive etc...
Ha! Found it. That's what I meant... My decade-old broken project (Monolith MD) found in my archive storage dated 2016 used to be a repo at BitBucket. Built with decade-old Electron version. I try to revive it as much as I can...
Besides Typora, I would recommend MarkText. Tried it out and was impressed with how simple and clean looking it is 😉 Also open source and available on all platforms 😉
LOL... I have no idea who forked who... I stay neutral. Don't want to interrupting anything.
Notion is a really good app for making posts but the drafts feature is also good. However I usually don't use it because the Drafts feature is kind of small (they show you Markdown tips which I only want to view occasionally which makes the editor a bit smaller)
I usually use MS Word for writing long texts that I want to spend more time on and where the quality of the content is important to me. That being said, I didn't realize that you guys take writing articles here so seriously, moving forward I will try to be a little more considerate about what I put out here :)
If the article has a very long content, I draft it down with a markdown app locally. Sometimes, I am markdown them on my usual IDE. Otherwise, just type and ship, just like @_garybell said.
I use my personal blog as a source of truth: Jekyll + Markdown + Github pages.... CarlosChac.in
Generally, I use atom to edit the markdown files
Then I use the import option on dev.to to import the articles as drafts.
I write my first draft in Notion.
Then I put it in a private repository called "writing".
There I edit it with visual studio code with the spell right plugin
At some point I copy paste it in dev and click on submit without thinking twice about it.
Now that the article is published, I feel the pressure to polish it.
So I edit it again a few times in visual studio code or typora and copy paste it in DEV.
Rinse and repeat.
This is something I wanna get better at, organising my draft posts. I have them on my blog, on Medium and on Evernote. Right now, I have 10 blog posts in draft in various places. 😱
Proper CMS that works for you is the key to stay productive and be in control 💯
I just was thinking... I'd like to post more regularly to dev.to but since I use Hugo is annoying as I have to republish each post from rss and it doesn't convert my gist and youtube links correctly.
Got me thinking a github action would be cool .. someone already thought of it 🤟. I'll have to take a look.
github.com/marketplace/actions/pub...
Sometimes directly in DEV dashboard, sometime type in LO Writer, then use online service to convert to Markdown.
I write drafts in my local and after completed I push them to my blog. Then dev picks them up from rss.
Directly in DEV or sometimes in a text-editor like SublimeText or VIM, which I copy-paste into DEV after a little bit.