Special Feed for Dev.to

Back in January 2017 I started following what looked like a small and promising community of programmers (and those in adjacent fields) over at Dev.to. At the time I had the site’s whole feed pumping into my Feedly list, I’d commented on a few posts, and I was starting to think about either revitalizing this blog or picking some other platform for posting. In the end I decided to try and revitalize this site, beginning with a bit on the tech behind a couple of projects.

One of the things I’d considered at the time, and mentioned in Projects Projects Projects, is setting up a custom RSS feed for just the articles I wanted to submit at Dev.To. I plan on publishing a wide variety of articles here, and I know not all of them will be right for the community there, so I want to make sure I’m filtering out the rest. I tried just running my regular RSS feed to my profile there, but it left a lot of cruft on my dashboard in the drafts, and even if I deleted the drafts they would just show up again on the next refresh.

Which brings us to this bit - I’ve got a second RSS feed now with just the articles that I want to send over there.

In the front matter I have a repost variable like so:

Originally I was going to set up a “to-dev.to” tag, and go that way, but that didn’t seem useful for the people who were visiting my site.

And there’s now a todev.to.xml that filters through the posts for just those that I want to republish.

At my next opportunity, I’m going to try and pump it through the Compress layout and see if that can get the size down without breaking anything. Though now that I think about it, I’d have to either adapt it to work with Pretzel or do the Pretzel-to-Jekyll conversion first.

So there’s the short version. I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to do this, but I probably won’t worry too much about it until I do the conversion to Jekyll. I don’t plan on adding any more features before then.

(Hot damn! that makes 4 for 4 on my “Almost NaNoWriMo”!)