I’ve been posting to Dev.to for a little while now. I’ve always posted to my website first, then more or less copy and pasted the markdown into the Dev.to editor. I thought there must be a better way, and luckily stumbled upon a setting that allows you to automatically link blog posts from GitHub Pages (or any RSS feed) to Dev.to!

We’ll go through the steps of enabling RSS on a GitHub pages site, and then we’ll link it up to a Dev.to blog.

Adding RSS To GitHub Pages

Adding RSS support to a GitHub Pages is very simple. All we have to do is add the following line to the _config.yml file in the root directory of the project.

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed

To test locally, we can add the following entry to the project’sGemfile. (If you haven’t yet set up a local environment for your GitHub pages site, please follow this guide.)

gem 'jekyll-feed'

We can do a bundle install, which will install the required gem.

When we run the site using bundle exec jekyll serve, go to the pagelocalhost:4000/feed.xml. You should see something like this:

<feed>
    <generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="3.8.5">Jekyll</generator>
    <link href="https://yoursite.com/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"/>
    <link href="https://yoursite.com/" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/>```


    <!-- Full xml omitted -->

Side note: Technically, this is an Atom feed but this will work fine for our use case.

Once we have confirmed it works, we can push it to GitHub via the following command:git commit -am "Add jekyll-feed gem"; git push

Linking RSS on Dev.to

Firstly, we need to go tohttps://dev.to/settings/publishing-from-rss.

We then just have to paste in ‘https://yoursite.com/feed.xml’ into the box, and press ‘update’.

I did enable the ‘Mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default’. This means it will mark my blog posts on my website as the original source, which helps my website appear in Google.

After a small wait, posts from GitHub pages should appear in the Dashboard. They initially come in as drafts and posts can be published individually.

Possible Improvements

While the RSS integration works really well, there’s a couple of small issues I encountered.

When I initially set up RSS on the Dev.to side, it said it fetched my feed but I didn’t see any entries in my dashboard. It wasn’t until I checked a bit later that posts were sent across from my blog. I certainly don’t have a problem with waiting, but I thought I did something wrong as there was no clear messaging that it takes a little while.

Another thing is that I have some entries from my blog that I don’t want to publish on Dev.to. However, if I delete the entries from my dashboard, they just come right back. It’d be good if there was some way to ‘ignore’ a blog post from an RSS feed.

Conclusion

To reiterate the steps:

1. Add the - jekyll-feed to the plugins section in _config.yml
2. Go to https://dev.to/settings/publishing-from-rss
3. Enter https://yoursite/feed.xml as the RSS Feed URL
4. Press update.
5. Check your Dashboard to see your posts! (may take a little while)