One of my favorite aspects of working as a software engineer coach at Flatiron School is our requirement of students to write blogs. It was this requirement, when I was a student, that sparked my love for blogging, and I really enjoy trying to pass on that love and excitement to my students.
When we first start discussing the blog requirements with the students, I always bring up DEV as a friendly blogging platform for beginners. I encourage them to signup with DEV and start building their online presence.
My experience reading their blogs on DEV has brought a few small tools/skills to my attention that newbies writing on DEV are lacking. I know that my students aren't the only newbies to this blogging platform, so I wanted to create this blog post about helpful tips I think all DEV members should be made aware of.
Without further ado, let's
Markdown Tips
These tips are for the purpose of helping you while writing your blog posts!
Creating Code Snippets
Creating code snippets in markdown is really easy and something you will use quite often while technical blogging. There are two types of code snippets that you can create in markdown. One type is an inline code snippet. The other is a multiline code snippet, also known as a fenced code block. Both make use of what is known as the backtick or backquote ( ` ).
Inline Code Snippet
If you ever want to mention any small amount of code, a built-in method, etc. that won't need multiple lines, you should use an inline code snippet. In order to create an inline code snippet, all you need to do is utilize one backtick before and one backtick after the code you wish to be displayed within the code snippet.
Here is a peak at what this should look like within the text editor:
Here is what this code looks like in preview mode:
Multiline Code Snippet
Now that we know how to display a simple inline code snippet lets dive into a multiline code snippet. I think it's really important to know how to make a multiline code snippet because most code that we want to display to a reader is how a method should look/function or the way a file should appear. To do this, we need to include multiple lines of code, hence the multiline code snippet.
In order to make use of a multiline code snippet we must start with 3 backticks then press enter/return
to go to the next line to start writing our code. Once we are finished writing the code we wish to display, we use 3 backticks to close it off.
Here is a peak at what this should look like within the text editor:
Here is what this code looks like in preview mode:
Don't move on from multiline code snippets just yet, because I have one more trick to show you. Some of you may be looking at the above code snippet thinking "Why is it all black and white? Where are all the colors?" Well that is because we haven't specified a language! Yeah, that's right!! You can specify a language to a multiline code snippet so that you can add the functionality of syntax highlighting. All you have to do is add the language name following the first 3 backticks.
Here is a peak at what using Ruby should look like within the text editor:
Here is what this code looks like in preview mode:
For JavaScript:
Here is what this code looks like in preview mode:
Creating Hypertext Links
For me personally, it really makes me uncomfortable to see a full URL in a blog post. An example of this would be https://dev.to/torianne02. I prefer to create a hypertext link which takes up less room (more often than not) and looks cleaner. So, I could reference my DEV profile like this. See? Looks much cleaner!!
In order to create a hypertext link we need to make use of brackets and parentheses. The words you want to display go inside the brackets and the link URL itself goes inside the parentheses. I know a lot of people have a tough time remembering which comes before the other. My way of remembering it is thinking that it's in alphabetical order. B comes before P in the alphabet!
Let's take a look at what this looks like in the text editor.
Outreach Tips
These tips are geared towards helping you reach a larger audience! They aren't must-dos but I highly recommend them if you want to grow your audience and gain more exposure.
Use Tags
One way to gain more exposure is to appropriately tag your blog post. For example, if you are writing about building RSpec
tests you could use the following tags: ruby, testing, webdev
.
{% tag ruby %}
If it is a really basic explanation of RSpec
tests, you could even use the tag beginners
.
This brings me to my next point: some tags have rules/guidelines. On DEV, tags are moderated. If you tag your article with one and it doesn't fit within that tag's guidelines, a moderator can remove the tag from your article and will most likely email you with an explanation of why it was removed. I'm speaking from personal experience here, getting an email may not always be the case.
Locating Tag Guidelines
There are two places that I know of to find guidelines for the tags.
- While in the
v2
editor on DEV, when you enter the name of a tag, if the tag has guidelines, there will be aview rules
button that appears in the list of choices to the right of the tag.
- Another way to see the guidelines is to go to the tags page on DEV. If the tag has guidelines they can be found within the left sidebar.
Managing Your Post
My last two tips are in regards to after your post has been published to the wild. When you go to your article page, right by the read time you should see two buttons: EDIT
and MANAGE
. I want you to click on that lovely MANAGE
button.
There are two things here that I'd like to discuss which both help get your article more exposure.
Add a Tweet Suggestion
There are multiple different DEV accounts on Twitter that could possibly share your article, especially if you use tags. The main DEV account shares all different types of articles on Twitter. There is also a ton of other examples of DEV accounts, such as The Ruby DEV, The JavaScript DEV, and the The Beginner DEV. There are many others as well!
All of these accounts have thousands of followers. If you don't add a tweet suggestion they often choose a random quote from your article. If you want to have control over what quote may get displayed alongside your article, I suggest adding a tweet suggestion.
Choose an Experience Level
This one is pretty self explanatory. There is a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being for "total newbies" and 10 being for "senior devs". Choose what audience you want to reach with this blog post. If you are writing a post for beginners, choose something closer to 1. If you are writing something that is really complex and is meant for more experienced developers, choose something closer to 10.
Final Thoughts
Throughout this article I've given you quite a few awesome tips to help your blog posts gain more exposure as well as a few tips for when writing your blog posts. I hope that y'all have found them useful and maybe have learned something new!
I will note here that you do not need to implement my tips. If you don't you can still write great blog posts and reach a larger audience. These are just things I notice work for me!
Happy writing!! ✍️
Note: This posts cover image is brought to you from a hike I did at Zion National Park in Utah.
Top comments (17)
This is a great resource for newbies to DEV. Thanks for writing this. One thing I would add is, get to know the liquid tags offered by DEV's editor as they offer rich embedding of popular sites/tools like Twitter, codepen, Instagram etc. When you're in the editor, simply click on the ? button at the bottom of the editor to see the list of supported liquid tags.
Looking forward to your next post!
I attempted using these for the tags themselves within this post when I was discussing tags, but they wouldn't work within my post. 🙁
#ruby
Yet I use it here and it works. 🤔
Hmm, could be a bug. If you can still reproduce it, consider opening an issue in the DEV repo.
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Thanks for the great article. The section about the backticks ( `
) is surprisingly important. I'm embarrassed to admit it took me years...yeeeeears of using a computer before I ever realized there was a backtick key🤦♂️ I remember being so frustrated whenever I'd encounter these "weirdly formatted apostrophes" and couldn't reproduce code or commands without having to copy&paste. I also remember the moment I saw an animated scene in a game, that just showed the tilda button pressing and depressing with information on what it did in game. I sat there for a solid 20 minutes just completely dumbfounded.
Quick follow-up question about the first few paragraphs where you discussed blogging being a requirement for your students. Why does there seem to be a push to get people coming into Tech to be hyper-social social media users? It's like there's now a requirement where in order to be in the industry you have to have an active public git commit history, a daily blog, give talks at cons, and be super active on Twitter. It seems kind of foreign to me. What am I not getting?
I believe there is a huge push to be active on social media and blogging platforms because it is a form of networking. I think networking is the big push here.
When you become active on these platforms, you start interacting with people from all over and you can try to leverage that to try and find a job.
This is all just a guess from my experience though, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.
When I started out as a programmer under a good mentorship, I was forced to write posts every day to share whatever we have accomplished on the last day.
It was very frustrating at times to find time for such a trivial thing but now I really like the idea of blogging regularly.
Nice post.
I did not know about adding the language for syntax highlighting always wondered how that worked great tip thanks.
It's worth noting you can even use languages you might not always expect, like
bash
!Amazing post!
Can I use Dev to post about non-technology; like psychology, book review, etc? Hehehe..
There is a tag
#watercooler
Thanks 😀
I'm new here.
Great post Victoria. This is gonna go a long way helping beginners who are interested in writing on here.
Thanks for the tip on specifying a language in code snippets. I edited on of my CSS posts and it looks better now. Which means some time I'll have to go and edit the code in other old posts.
Thanks for the info!
Nice one. I wish DEV would support line highlighting in code snippets