I’m a big fan of POSSE. I love the idea of owning your content, saving it in your private place on the Web, and share it anywhere. I already cross-posted some articles from my website to DEV, but every time I had to arrange the text to let it fits DEV’s context. To give you an example, on my website, I can write “This website uses…”, but when I copy the article on DEV, I need to change the sentence to “My website uses…”. Do you apply some best practices during writing when you plan to cross-post your articles?
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How do you cross-post articles from your blog to DEV?
Publish Date: Nov 21 '20
15 20Comments 20 total
John FayNov 21, 2020All my blog posts are written in markdown so I can copy and paste them over. The one change I recall often making is the need to import and update image links. Once it’s in dev though I can view the post and completely copy it and it imports perfectly to medium.
perpetual . educationNov 21, 2020Our blog posts often have little Vue apps in them - and it's all fed from a custom CMS, so - having parity on dev isn't really possible. It would be different if our articles were just markdown. Then you can use the tools they provide to Canonical URLs.
We know that some people have a problem with this: but we will (when we feel it makes sense) write a post something like this:
- Hello!
- Here's a thing we did (link/video/CodePen/repo)
- We did it for this reason (which is why we're showing it to you)
- If you like x and y - then it might worth your time
- Bye
Which - in many cases / gives added information to the article vs just a copy-paste cross post.
Putting the post or video in a context-specific to Dev.to - (in our minds) - isn't just duplicating the article, but helping someone understand our reasoning and if it's worth their time.
If that is scummy - or spammy - then the internet is already over.
MaximeNov 21, 2020I've built a CLI to publish on dev.to from the command line (and therefore on CI for example). It's here : dev.to/maxime1992/manage-your-dev-...
The code for the CLI can be found on github. I guess you could fork it and tweak it a bit to accept comment or tags which publish only on one location. Then you could pass as an argument the target and it'd generate only what's needed for the target environment? Maybe there's a simple solution not sure just sharing what comes first to my mind
Arman @programmerByDayNov 22, 2020Well I usually keep that in my mind when i am writing in my blog. And I use an online wordpress to markdown converter to help me import the content
Mark SmithNov 22, 2020My blog is an ssg site, all the content is in markdown, so I just copy/paste, but I have to update a few things so it displays correctly.
I also add a link at the top saying originally posted on blog.markjgsmith.com. Makes it easier for readers to find the blog if they liked the post.
I wish others added their blog url to their posts too.
Michael TharringtonNov 22, 2020I'm interested if anybody looking at this thread is using the Publishing from RSS feature to import their posts from a blog elsewhere?
When I think of answering the question How do you cross-post articles from your blog to DEV?, this is probably the first thing that comes to mind. 🙂
The second thing that DEV also offers is the ability for authors to specify a canonical URL in their posts which helps Google (and other search engines) understand where an article came from first. This is good for your SEO if you're looking to grow traffic on your own private blog.
NOTE: If you use the Publishing from RSS feature mentioned above, the canonical URL, should be automatically added to your post.
And let's see... are there any other cool reposting tips I can give ya?
One thing that DEV ask folks not to do is to post short "lead in" articles with a sentence or two that then say "Read more here..." and link to a page elsewhere. There's not hard stance against these posts, but they'll not be heavily promoted and the community generally seems to be put off by posts that tease content elsewhere.
Ruan MartinelliNov 23, 2020And if anyone is curious how to add the Canonical URL here, just add
canonical_url: <link_to_original_post>to the header (same place where you have the title) of your Markdown. :-)You will know that it worked if you see this under the title of your post:
- Michael TharringtonNov 23, 2020
Awesome addition, thanks for that added clarity, Ruan!
And another note on that... if you're using the
Rich + Markdowneditor version (which you can select from here), then the UX for inputting a Canonical URL is just slightly different. Just click the little gear icon at the bottom of the page beside Publish/Save Draft and you'll find the place to input your canonical. 
raivikasNov 23, 2021Will this affect my orignal post link. Like SEO problem or not appearing in Google Search. If I use the RSS feature to import articles from my blog to dev.to .
- Michael TharringtonNov 23, 2021
There are a lot of factors that might affect your SEO and it's too difficult for me to say 100% that reposting to DEV via the RSS feature won't affect your SEO.
However, if you want to apply the canonical URL to all posts when importing them via RSS, make sure to check the box that says "Mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default" when setting things up:
Also, if you'd like to read more in depth about this subject, check out this post on forem.dev.
- Michael TharringtonMay 18, 2021
Uh-oh! It sounds like something may be broken if you're unable to designate a canonical URL. 🤔
That said, there isn't typically a form that pops up when inputting a canonical URL.
Can you confirm which editor version you're using?
Rich + MarkdownorBasic Markdown?
I haven't run into changing text situation, but I need to change the internal links in Markdown. When I author posts, all the internal links start from
/, so I need to pretend the domain name when cross-posting.