Would you look at that? You’re now seeing crossposts to my dev.to blog.
How’d I do it?
There were two main parts:
- Generate an RSS feed for the original blog at effendiian.github.io
- Connect it using the RSS extension provided by Dev.to’s settings.
Generating the RSS feed
My website is a static site built with Hexo and served through GitHub Pages. Hexo’s documentation isn’t the best, but with a little digging, I found that, in the years since I last used it, they’ve provided a pretty robust first-party plugin for generating RSS and ATOM feeds.
You can read more about atom.xml feeds here.
Using the RSS feed
Thanks to the excellent writeup from Tessa Kriesel on, Connecting your RSS feed URL for easy publishing to dev.to, it was quite simple to get it all working.
You simply add the feed to your Dev.to site via the RSS extension under settings.
You can read more about rss2.xml feeds here.
Connecting to other third-party platforms
This is good for now, but I’d also like to see if I can connect to other platforms, like LinkedIn and the site formerly known as Twitter.
There may even be a pretty reasonable solution using GitHub actions, given this project from @lwojcik/github-action-feed-to-social-media, which allows for posting to platforms like Mastodon and Discord as well.
Why do this now?
Three driving reasons for why I want to get back into blogging:
- Vague interests in technical writing.
- I love organizing information - similar to personal knowledge management systems.
- I should be documenting my learning.
The old site hadn’t been touched in years since I was busy getting degrees and working full-time. Now that I’ve finished the official rebranding of my site and @effendiian GitHub account (formerly known as @rimij405), it’s time to start posting, making things, and sharing on my different social media platforms.
With that, I’m glad to be writing again!
What’s next? What should you expect?
Expect more. Well, more of this stuff:
- Frequent, shorter posts that get straight to the point
- Occasional post-mortems and retrospectives
- Musings on system design, every once in a while
- Observations about note-taking process and knowledge management
- Quicklooks into useful open-source projects
There are also some other site-related improvements:
- Updating the footer so it’s not so cramped and has a better sitemap layout.
- Embed this GitHub contributions tracker on the site.
- Adding support for
::-style emojis (eg.:smile:) with this hexo-filter-emoji package. - Polishing the website’s landing page (maybe with some 3D illustrations… looking at you Three.js)
- Adding some analytics (which is simple, but also requires I add cookie consent trackers and global policy control listeners… so not so straightforward).
I’m also considering rewriting the application with a framework like Nuxt or adding UnoCSS styles, just to play around with the technology and see what I can do. Hexo feels like it’s not quite ready for production use in an enterprise context, but it’s really straightforward to get up and running with for smaller groups and solo developers.