Do you have your own Gatsby site? Let's brainstorm a dev.to cross-poster

June 23, 2019

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productivity

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tools

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react

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dev

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gatsby

So, like all good things, the idea for this post comes from a tweet:

This is something I've been ruminating on for a bit. I've even tried to build it - a few times! I keep starting in on the work and getting lost in the millions of directions I could take it.

Here's what I'd like: When I publish a new post to my gatsby site (you're on it now!), I'd like for that post to appear on dev.to automatically.

It should:

• recreate my post verbatim, from its original markdown source
• use the canonical_url frontmatter field to make sure I retain SEO goodness on my post
• happen without my intervention
• be agnostic of where my posts are coming from. I use takeshape.io as a headless CMS for my site, so my individual posts aren't in source control
• only take posts from my master branch, since I use feature branches for draft posts from time to time
• use the dev.to API, of course

Nice to have:

• maybe posts should be set to published: false at first, so I can preview/review/update them as needed for dev.to?

Possible approaches for this:

1. Tap into GitHub's webhooks somehow, and fire off a post here
2. Come from a job kicked off after CI, maybe? I use CircleCI, but would like this feature to be fairly implementation agnostic.
3. Use a GitHub App?
4. ...or a GitHub Action?
5. Perhaps just a lamba function deployed to AWS or Netlify Functions.

So - here's where I ask for your help. Surely there's a simple approach here I haven't thought of, or maybe it's a matter of collecting a few scenarios and building something based on 80/20.

What else am I missing here? I'd love your help. What use cases would you have for a cross-poster from your gatsby site? How would you implement it? How can we help each other?