This isn’t the only place I’m posting my writing. I’m also posting to dev.to and Tealfeed. These are other knowledge sharing networks, free to use, and both with options to set your own blog as the canonical URL.
Here are the early pro’s and con’s of each:
Dev.to
Dev.to has two major positives:
- It is a big and supportive community
- The editor is easy and accepts copying from WordPress
Dev.to is a very well-known community of tech writers. It’s not just a blogging site. Even on my first post, I quickly had a positive comment offering some more helpful information building on top of what I wrote.
The editor to write a post is straightforward. It even accepts copying and pasting code from WordPress with no issues, even for images. Each post has a featured image which is not restricted in dimensions, so it’s easy to use the same one used on this site. That makes it very simple to quickly copy over posts I did here to share on dev.to as well.
It also has one minor negative: Dev.to is specifically for developers, as the name implies. I am only posting web development related things there, not Microsoft IT things or anything else I feel like sharing. Even on this point, there is some positive trade-off, as it means that the tags will allow you to get much more precise, such as “css” instead of “web development.”
Tealfeed
Tealfeed is a less well-known platform, at least in developer circles. My first impressions were not great. I created an account and logged in for the first time. The page spun for about 15 minutes before I gave up because I had other things to do. I came back a week later. This time it loaded my homepage with no issues. It may have been a one-time fluke, but some unfortunate timing.
I then created my first post. I tried to do what I do with dev.to: copy the WordPress page. That did not work at all. It does not interpret HTML tags and does not ignore the WordPress specific tags. It does not support a lot of formatting like headers at all. It does support images and separators, but not as HTML tags. You have to use the editor interface. So even for those features that are supported, you have to do it all over again. It does take a featured image, but it’s restricted to certain dimensions, so if you care about that and don’t already have your image in the right dimensions, you’ll spend more time to create an alternate image copy. All told, while dev.to takes about 2 minutes to copy a post from WordPress, Tealfeed takes more like 15 to reformat everything.
It’s got a few other oddities that demonstrate it simply isn’t very far allow in its development. If I use dark mode, which I always prefer, there are a handful of places in the key post creation process where it has black text on a black background. Not helpful.
The one thing that does make it more interesting is that it is not limited to developers, or even technology as a whole. You can follow lots of topics like psychology and photography as well.
Conclusion
Dev.to is absolutely worth the effort to copy posts from here to there, at least for those that fall broadly within the realm of “developer.” There’s no debate on that one to me.
Tealfeed is a bit more complicated. It’s hard to say yet whether it’s worth the effort to copy posts, especially since it takes so much longer to reformat. I’ll continue to give it a shot for at least a month or two before making a final judgement. I can pretty easily talk myself into keeping an account for the sake of following other interesting topics, though. It’s too bad they don’t have a mobile app, because I could definitely see it being an app I scroll for interesting stuff outside of work hours.