I discovered DEV in 2020. I know, I'm late to the party. But I really love the platform. It's a great place to share content and discover or learn new things.
In the last few days, I started thinking: what are the things that I would add to make this platform even better? Here are the 2 that kept popping up in my mind!
Allow for alt/caption on cover image
I think a lot of people here use images from Unsplash or other sources as cover for their posts. I know I do. It's important in this case to give credit back to the people that produced the image.
Currently, everyone of my posts ends with the credit for the image. I'd love to be able to set it when I upload the image so it would be displayed naturally.
This would incentive people to do it (no way to forget about it!), and makes it more visible for readers.
It would also be awesome to have an option to set an alt text, for better accessibility!
Allow better reviews before publishing
I know that it's already possible to share a draft post before publishing it, but to be honest I am not using this feature. When I want a review, I either use a Google Doc, or a Github pull request. This way, people can make comment, or edits, related to a specific part of the post. It makes writing so much easier!
To be clear, it is fine as it is, I just copy and paste the markdown before publishing. But this can lead to some errors (you sometimes need to do your edits twice when you're as badly organised as I am).
Maybe a really nice option would be to be able to link a Github repository to your DEV account. Then every Markdown file that gets committed is automatically published. Or maybe just created as a draft. This way, no need to implement custom review process in DEV, we can just use PRs!
What are yours?
Of course I have a few other ideas: improving the post stats to get insights on post performance over time for example. But these two are the ones that I think about most!
I'd love to hear what are your thoughts and crazy idea about DEV!
Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash
Top comments (3)
Hmm integration with Unsplash api would be great. I usually forget to credit too.
To review before publishing, check this:
dev.to/nickmaris/post-dev-to-artic...
This is fantastic, thanks!