crosspost

Markdown Blog Integration for Developers

Write your developer article in markdown once, publish and sync on webflow, dev.to, GitHub, Medium & codementor.

At the moment, with CrossPost you will be able to write your developer article in markdown using your favorite editor and automatically push/update it on webflow and dev.to.

Check out the full tutorial fullstack.coach to get yourself started to write your content in markdown and to configure your top notch IWE (Integrated Writer Environment).

So far codementor.io and Medium don't offer an API to create articles, so that you'll need to follow a few more manual steps to import your articles there (again, you can see the complete fullstack.coach blog writing tutorial for the necessary steps).

Use Cases

• Host your blog in webflow, dev.to and GitHub: write markdown once, push to all platforms with a single command! 🚀
• Want to write your blog in markdown but host in on Webflow? One command! 🚀
• Keep your markdown between webflow and dev.to in sync. 1 cmd.
• Want to keep your blog on dev.to, but version control and open source it in GitHub? Yeah, you've guessed it, 1 command!

Installation

~ npm install -g crosspost

Getting Started

For now, CrossPost's main purpose is to take a markdown file from your local file system and publish it on webflow and dev.to with one command. After installing CrossPost as described above, you can check out all commands by running crosspost in your terminal. You should encounter something like this for CrossPost 1.1.3 version:

~ crosspost
Usage: crosspost [options] [command]
 
Options:
  -V, --version                  output the version number
  -h, --help                     display help for command
 
Commands:
  configure [options]            Configure CrossPost
  article [options] <file_path>  Cross post markdown article 🚀
  help [command]                 display help for command

If you never used CrossPost before, you'll need to configure it first:

~ crosspost configure

There will be a little interview to set up the connection to the different APIs. Visit our step by step tutorial at fullstack.coach to set yourself up in more detail.

Navigate to the directory of your markdown article.

~ cd articles/folder

Push an article to webflow and dev.to in one go:

~ crosspost article your-article.md

You could also just push it to webflow:

~ crosspost article your-article.md --to webflow

Need help

If you don't know where to go after installing CrossPost do this to get an overview over crosspost's capabilities:

~ crosspost --help

Or do this to get details about a certain command:

~ crosspost article --help

If you really really get stuck, create an Issue on GitHub or reach out to me :)

You shouldn't get stuck hopefully though, if you carefully read the full documentation post over at fullstack.coach.

Contributing

That's the brute force way, I've just come up with. There is certainly a more elegant way to do that 🙈.

1. Fork this repo
2. Clone to your local machine
3. If you have CrossPost already installed from remote NPM run npm uninstall crosspost -g
4. cd into/cloned/repo
5. npm install -g (will install the local version globally) Now you can do your changes on the source code and see their impact when running ~ crosspost
6. Push your changes to your remote repository
7. Issue a PR towards this repo

Thank you!

Release History

• 1.0.0
  • Work in progress
• 1.1.0
  • First version: granularly configurable and with Webflow & dev.to integrated
• 1.1.1 Updated the README.md to a workable state
• 1.1.2 Fixed bug that articles are always created even when they should just be updated
• 1.1.3 Adjusted README & added reference to the full documentation guide

CrossPost Caveats & Configurations

Please keep in mind that it's an early version of CrossPost, so that bugs might not be ruled out and some stuff might still not be documented.

Speaking of documentation, you will also need to perform some setup steps described over at fullstack.coach, especially when it comes to configuring webflow to accept and display your markdown articles (webflow does not work with markdown out of the box).

Carefully read the webflow/dev.to configurations and caveats sections from this comprehensive documentation post. You may also find other cool technical blogging stuff there, by the way.