A Foot In Both Worlds; Meeting The Community Where They’re At

As I’ve recently restarted slinging words onto the internet, there were questions I needed to answer before I got back to business. After deciding to stop wasting my time agonizing over a personal site, I needed to grapple with exactly where I wanted to toss these words to. In the past, I’ve gravitated towards Dev.To because that’s where all my friends were. However, I also liked the idea of Medium because I knew folks who wrote things here and the option of potentially monetizing things if I wanted to go that route in the future.

So, like any reasonable technologist, I decided I didn’t want to think about this anymore and I was going to do both. I’d use Medium as a home base and I’d also shuttle those same writings back over to Dev.

Medium As Home Base. Why?

Now why have I decided to write in Medium instead of to Medium? At this point, I’m still figuring out the how of my writing process, but at this point I’ve been bouncing between Notion and the Medium app itself. At this point, the UX of the Medium app is nice enough and allows me to just tap out some words as I’m thinking about things and then easily come back to polish them up at my computer later. So the ease of use at this point is what has drawn me to stay here instead of just publishing out to Medium as a second location.

How.To Dev.To

So now that I figured out where I’m initially publishing come content, I needed to figure out how I was going to get it to a second location at DEV. I initially thought I would need to dust off a very old GitHub Action to get this done. While I’m always up for breathing some new life into my old projects, I also didn’t want to go find out all the ways that the DEV API has probably changed since I last touched it. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were going to make this much easier on me.

Trust, Dusty RSS

Enter the well established, very reliable RSS protocol. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a protocol that allows websites to publish and update content in a common format for downstream consumers to ingest.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that both of these sites offered RSS in the direction that I needed them. Medium on the sending side offers an RSS feed of articles that you publish that others can subscribe to. One thing on the Medium side that I want to call out is just how well documented and configurable it is. You can get an RSS feed in almost any shape that you that your heart desires (your whole feed, just specific tags, custom domain, etc.). It’s amazing.

For my example, it was easy. I wanted it all.

So I was able to get this by utilizing an address in the shape of https://medium.com/feed/@ . With my RSS feed in hand, I was then able to head on over to DEV to get things configured on that end.

Configuring RSS Replication To DEV

As I already had a DEV profile to start, I was able to get right to business. If you don’t already have one, you can head on over and go through a standard sign up process just as you would with any other site. Once you’ve got your account in hand, you can get logged in and you’ll be able to click on your account iconin the upper right hand corner of the screen. Once you click on that icon, you’ll see a dropdown and you can click on Settings.

Account Dropdown Screen

Once you click on Settings , you’ll be taken to your account info page. You’ll see an Extensions option in the navbar on the left side of the screen. Click on extensions and you’ll be greeted with a number options. The one we’re interested in is labeled as Publishing to DEV Community from RSS . It’ll look something like this:

There’s a few lines of information here (and you’ll notice they specifically call out how to do this from Medium, which is convenient). But what we’re most interested in is dropping the RSS feed link we’ve already pulled together. From here, there are two additional options that you might be interested in. The most important of these is Mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default .

What does that mean? What is a canonical url? Well if you do a quick search, you’ll have some folks who think it is super critical. Others will say it’s SEO nonsense that no one actually follows. But to keep things simple, according to our good friends over at Google, the canonical URL is the most representative link to a piece of work on the internet. In other words, it’s the original or source of the content. So in this case, we’re marking our source article on Medium as the original source so that search engines drive traffic to the original source, while still making it available to the community we still want to be part of over on DEV.

Once we’ve got all of that plugged in, we can go ahead and click Save Feed Settings and everything will begin to get sucked into Dev. And we’re off to the races, right? RIGHT?!

A Little Tidying Up Never Hurts

Well, turns out we’re not quite finished yet. Setting up our RSS ingestion only brings things over to DEV as a Draft. You’ll see all of these articles in your dashboard, but you’ll still want to do a quick read through of those imported articles to make sure things like images and formatting look appropriate. While DEV does it’s best to take the content as it is from the source, there will inevitably be a few things that will need cleaned up.

What you should see for all articles that are pulled over, is something like this:

To get things published, is not exactly self-explanatory. I was expecting to be able to click Edit and then see a big shiny red button that said Publish . However, what you’ll be greeted with instead is only a button that says Save Changes . While you may think to yourself that’s all you’ll need to do, if you click that button it’ll actually just save your changes and stay in Draft mode.

For those a bit more well versed in Markdown this might make a little more sense to you though. At the top of every imported post, you’ll see something that looks like

---
title: Making Your Docker Network Reachable In MacOS
published: false
date: 2024-09-21 21:45:18 UTC
tags: mac,development,localdevelopment,docker
canonical_url: https://medium.com/@tylerauerbeck/making-your-docker-network-reachable-in-osx-e68f998f8249
---

This is called frontmatterand is actually really cool to be able to see! It tells you the canonical_url that we talked about, as long as the title, date, tags, etc. that get pulled over from Medium. But the important one is published . Until you set that to true , your post will remain in Draft and only those with the direct link will be able to come see it.

That’s not what we want! So once you’re ready, flip that flag to true and click Save Changes . Once you do, your post will be live on both sites!

Is This Worth It?

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. I saw that I could make two things that I like using work together, so I pressed some buttons. In the long run, I’ll be interested to compare the stats between the two sites. I figure at the least, this will help me figure out where I should direct some of my attention. Maybe there will be a time where I decide to flip between the two. On the other hand, maybe I’ll find that they’re complimentary and both have their benefits. For now, outside of the initial effort to get this set up, I don’t think it’s going to cost me much of my time to maintain, so I’ll be interested to see what it is I do learn from this. I’ll be sure to follow up with anything I do learn or any fun ways that I find to use this in the future.