Syndicate TWIR and the Rust blog (and possibly some team member blogs) to dev.to and medium

[skade]

Hi,

I just read on the blog from the fine people of crystal-lang that they start syndicating all their posts to dev.to, the platform behind https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev.

I think that's a really clever move and we could do that ourselves, possibly for both the blog and TWIR. dev.to is so nice to allow setting a canonical URL back to your original post, so we gain spread, but stay the main source of content.

Currently, the process isn't automated, but they indicated that they could help us with the manual labor.

Let's discuss next Wednesday.

[skade]

Currently also implementing this for Medium.

[skade]

I'm confused about how this best works on medium: As far as I could figure out, I'd be best if our twitter account signed up there and then we'd work from there by creating a publication. That would give us the current audience of the account. I have no access to our twitter account.

Then, we could add editors to the publication and set up reposting of our content through the RustLang twitter account.

@ashleygwilliams @steveklabnik, can you advise there?

I'd also be happy to do all that, but then, I'd need access.

[steveklabnik]

I don't know anything about Medium, really, other than I don't use it because then it doesn't get to be on my own domain.

[benhalpern]

Hey, dev.to founder here. When this was first brought up, we were supportive of the idea, but it was basically just me and one other person trying to run the show. We've come a ways since then and if you are interested, we'd love to do this.

Here are some notes about our current state:

• We can automatically pull in your feed
• Our editor is based on Jekyll and is transparent and pretty flexible to deal with
• We have an engaged on-platform community and external following via @ThePracticalDev
• There is more that you can do on the platform that might be interesting to you, perhaps an AMA like this one

We're a dedicated platform that more and more devs are using to keep up with the craft and facilitate news and discussions. When @skade brought this up the first time, he definitely had the right idea, but we were scrambling. We're very interested in partnering to grow Rust footprint.

[ashleygwilliams]

hey! wanted to add some context about why i think syndicating to medium would be great. as of this year node has started syndicating and soliciting community posts to medium and it has grown dramatically. here are some of the stats from our june and july public board meetings where the marketing department presented some numbers.

i think moving to medium is a great way to get more shares and reads of rust posts.

[skade]

@steveklabnik medium sets rel=canonical headers if you re-publish a post there (which is what we intend to do), so it can be on your domain and on medium.

My biggest issue is that I cannot set it up, as I have no access to the @rustlang twitter account. You could later add me as an editor on a publication.

@benhalpern I'd still like to follow up on that, too. Mainly, our two feeds are at blog.rust-lang.org and blog.community.rs

[benhalpern]

@skade @steveklabnik dev.to also provides the canonical URL feature.

@ashleygwilliams thanks so much for the data, this is super interesting. I'll give some data on our service that might help validate it in that sense as well.

This is data from 2016/2017. We started the platform last year but didn't go full time until this year. The bulk of these numbers are from the past few months.

• Our most-read author's posts have gotten 645,000 views (I'm that author for full disclosure)
• Several other authors have received 100,000+ views
• Our quarter-over-quarter traffic growth site-wide has been almost doubling and it's still early IMO
• Our self-reported "skill-level" among our users is bimodally distributed, clumping around 7-8s and 3-4s in on the 1-10 scale.

I'm sure Medium has us beat in some respects and we fully encourage folks to cross-post to both platforms if they wish, but we're pretty steadfast in our conviction that building out the platform to be oriented around the needs of developers instead of one-size-fits-all will make it an extremely viable option for distribution.

Let me know if I'm being too pushy, but I just want to emphasize that we're in a great place to go all in on the partnership, and are open to discussing Node things with you as well, Ashley.

P.S. We can also partner to do video content, similar to this if there is any interest in that.

P.P.S. I'm a big fan of the Rust Language project and have been looking for time to get dirty with it myself. Haven't quite carved it out yet, but I've been reading and watching talks on it. We're mostly a Ruby shop and it's been cool following some of my fave Rubyists get into Rust and influence the lang/community.