This is done using a small mixture of RSS feeds and Zapier. This should take you around 3 - 5 minutes to set up.
First, create an account on Zapier.
Do you have a blog on WordPress or Ghost? If so, Zapier has it all set up for you already. Create a new Zap and see if your blog is on there.
I use Ghost, but I'm going to use RSS here. Almost all blogs have an RSS feed. If you use Wordpress or Ghost, use them instead here. I'll also be showing how things work in Ghost.
Your next step is to connect it to Medium.
We want to auto-post content from your personal blog to Medium. We will then auto-post it from Medium to Dev.to (or from your blog to Dev.to)
When a new item is in the feed, we want to crosspost to Medium. If you're using the Ghost or Wordpress triggers, you'll want to activate it when a new story is posted. If you're using Ghost, you'll want to click here:
Sign into your Ghost / Wordpress accounts here. Now, back to RSS.
We enter the RSS feed here.
Now set up the Medium side of things
You want to create a new story in Medium. It'll ask you to login.
The content in RSS is called "description". My RSS feed publishes the entire article, yours may not. Doublecheck just in case. In Ghost, this looks like:
Next up, add some tags and fill out the rest of the information.
Make sure you set the canonical link to the link of your blogpost. This means that whenever a search engine finds your blogpost on Medium / Dev.to, it'll attribute all popularity of your blogpost from these platforms to your original article on your own site.
You can set it to auto publish, or just create a draft. I've chosen to create drafts here as this method isn't perfect and causes a few visual issues sometimes.
You can choose what publication you want to post to. I'm a contributor to Hackernoon, so I publish there. Here's the rest of my Ghost > Medium zap:
Now you should have an auto-cross poster to Medium from your own blog, even adding it to a publication if you wish.
Dev.to
Go into your settings on Dev.to.
Click "publishing from RSS".
I use my Ghost blog's RSS feed here, but you can use your Medium RSS feed here if you like.
Make sure to tick "mark the RSS source as canonical URL by default". If you use your Medium RSS feed, then all content will be attributed to your Medium blog post. That's why I use my normal RSS feed here.
We're done! You can now automatically crosspost to Medium and Dev.to from your personal blog. If you use Mathjax on your personal blog, Medium automatically converts this to images (how beautiful!). There are sometimes a few visual glitches, so always make sure to double check all the articles you post.
This article you're reading right now was automatically cross-posted to dev.to πβ¨
Top comments (3)
Should we be doing this for real?
Posting all our content from a personal blog to these other platforms? won't they rank on Google instead of us and we will disappear?
Probably a bit obsolete to comment it now, but from how I understood it, it is your personal blogspace that will benefit from those clicks if you set it as a canonical source.
Maybe you can make an tutorial to cross-post from an Medium publication into Dev.to org soon using Zapier?
Also this issue seems to be abandoned regarding adding natice support for RSS feeds from Medium publications:
support for publications / custom domain mapping #88
Feature
Request
I'm just wondering if we can have hosted pages/custom domains for us (similar to medium publication and map it to my domain/subdomain). If we can achieve this, dev.to will be a single hub for tech posts, I believe.
Definition of Done
Developers can make their own publications page (or even their company's) to host all their tech updates and posts. Eventually, we can map the publication to our own custom domains like when accessing writeups.myname.com it will serve my own dev.to publication page without URL redirection (URL must be my domain name).
Notes
suggestions are welcome for improvements.