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Peter Kim Frank for The DEV Team

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Changelog: Tweet Suggestions and other tools for authors

DEV authors now have new ways to manage and share their posts. From both the dashboard and individual post pages, you’ll see a new Manage button.

manage button location

After clicking that button, you’ll see a page that looks like this:

screenshot of manage area

We’ll likely be adding features to this page over time, but let’s talk through a few items on this page that you can immediately use:

Suggest a Tweet

The primary new feature is the ability to Suggest a Tweet. This is an opportunity to propose a tweet for your post which will go out across one of our Twitter accounts. In addition to our main @ThePracticalDev account, we also have a growing number of topic-specific accounts such as @TheBeginnerDev, @the_ruby_dev, etc. You can view the full list of DEV-affiliated Twitter accounts here.

We can’t share every tweet that gets proposed, and we reserve the right to make adjustments to the suggested copy, but this has already proven to be a great feature for authors. We quietly launched the feature a few weeks ago and it’s been working really well.

Experience Level

As an author, you now have the ability to assign the “experience level” of your post. This feature was described more fully in Ben’s original Changelog post, but the options is now available for authors in addition to community mods:

Filling out the experience level of your posts will help provide a gentle indicator to the feed algorithm, giving your target audience a slightly higher likelihood of encountering the article in their feed.

Mute notifications

If you’ve been fortunate enough to have one of your DEV posts get super popular, you might have experienced the desire to disable notifications for that specific post. This feature has technically been available from the Dashboard for a while, but we think it makes a lot more sense for it to live on this /manage page.

I tend to make use of this option when I have a #discuss post that is racking up replies.


That's it! If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment, send us an email, or open a GitHub issue ✌️

Top comments (3)

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healeycodes profile image
Andrew Healey • Edited

Looks great! I love this feature. It feels like a cool bonus whenever one of my articles gets shared on Twitter by y'all.

I like to design my cover image for DEV first -- but the format is wider than Twitter card images. This sometimes means that the text in my DEV cover image will get cut off on Twitter. To help with this, I've been using Twitter's card validator.

I've mostly solved this issue by designing my cover images to have the content in the middle with a blank color on either side.

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bengreenberg profile image
Ben Greenberg

The DEV team keeps on innovating! Way to go!

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helenanders26 profile image
Helen Anderson

Thanks team! I love the 'suggest a tweet' feature and have seen my posts pop up in the shiny new Database Dev account. These are great new features :)