Use GitHub as asset repository for your articles (a.k.a. hot linking images to GitHub)

The workflow of publishing in Substack automatically from the RSS feed of a GitHub page (that I published yesterday in this article) satisfies my needs.

Missing image in my local and Substack, not on Github

Those with a keen eye, however, might have noticed that one of the images in the article was missing in Substack: The place of the missing image is pointed by the arrow (pointing to nothingness)

I did notice quite quickly that the image was missing from Substack; interestingly it showed on Github Pages. What a bummer, I thought. What now?

Imgur was the problem

I slept it over, happy that the image failed to show in my local. That hinted to the solution.

Next day, I googled hotlinking from Imgur.

It turned out that Imgur has some restrictive policies to hotlink from blogs:

Github pages as asset repository

It didn’t took me long to realize that I could host the images in a Github page. And so, I did.

I created an assets repository on my GitHub and enabled GitHub Pages:

Now, I can hotlink images from my blog (Substack, Medium, Dev.to, even GutHub pages itself) to my asset repository. For free I get version control of my assets and complete control over them (other than privacy, I guess, since it’s a public read-only repository).

I hope GitHub pages remains free forever.

Will GitHub Pages remain free forever for public repositories?

A quick peek seem to point it will be free - hopefully with hotlinking - forever:

It appears GitHub Pages is remaining free - hopefully with hotlinking

However, in case it does not, it feels good to know that I have all my assets and articles locally saved and backup to the cloud.

More automation needed for a more convenient article writing experience

All is about experience now a days (user experience, developer experience, etc-experience), and my current experience for image handling is not the best.

For each image in this article, I had to:

1. Take a screenshot
2. Save it to local directory (preferably with a “hyphened-name”)
3. Add, commit and push to the repo
4. Build a link to the asset..

Phew! It’s only 4 steps but for every image it’s a hassle.

So I’ll do a script to automate these tasks so I only have to 1) take screenshot 2) type regular name 3) paste into article.

I’ll share more in the near future when it get’s implemented.