Re: Building a tool for tech bloggers to write, schedule and publish posts on all major platforms

I currently rely on WordPress and its RSS/Atom integration, which is still good for forwarding content from my personal blog site at reinhart1010.id to others like DEV.to and Hashnode through a mechanism namely “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” (POSSE). The good news is that I can just write new posts from my site, then selectively forward them into other blogging sites through automated export/import from the generated RSS/Atom feeds. But there are some challenges, though.

First, not all of my blog posts on my site might be relevant to, let’s say, DEV.to audiences. So I need to filter posts by two steps:

1. Manually tagging from my WordPress site that might be relevant, and that’s why I used specific tags like #feed-en-tech to be whitelisted in the generated, curated RSS feed at reinhart1010.id/tag/feed-en-tech/feed.
2. Choosing the right tags to be published on DEV.to. DEV.to posts are currently limited to 4 tags, and some of them (like #showdev) have their respective content guidelines.

Taking my post about how bad virtual expos are, I decided to republish to DEV.to under a different topic: User Experience, since #ux on DEV.to seems to be more active than others like “Virtual Reality”.

Another next problem is that it’s difficult to get “likes” from viewers on your WordPress site, unless if they have their respective personal blog sites. WordPress have implemented pingbacks since way back then, and modern alternatives like ActivityPub and Webmentions are (intentionally) unsupported on major blog platforms today like LinkedIn and Medium. The solution is either:

1. Republish my posts on other platforms, or
2. Encourage readers to use federated social platforms (e.g. Mastodon), or
3. Encourage readers to have their blog sites which supports sending pingbacks/webmentions

Of course, the last 2 options are not viable for those already comfortable with existing sites, like this DEV.to. That’s why I decided to selectively repost to other sites.

Speaking of your idea, I really recommend to implement these two features:

1. Assigning different tags/categories for publishing into different platforms,
2. An integrated counter (think about a WordPress plugin/widget) to show the current total number of views, likes, and comments. I think this closely follow your idea about analytics.