My adventures with dev.to and hashnode so far

As I said in my previous post, I was looking for a new blogging platform.

I created accounts on dev.to and on hashnode, and started my new Electron Adventures series.

Here's hashnode version:

• Electron Adventures: Episode 1: Creating New Electron App
• Electron Adventures: Episode 2: Frontend Code and Backend Code
• Electron Adventures: Episode 3: What Can Backend Code Even Do?
• Electron Adventures: Episode 4: Image Gallery with Dynamic HTML

And here's dev.to:

• Electron Adventures: Episode 1: Creating New Electron App
• Electron Adventures: Episode 2: Frontend Code and Backend Code
• Electron Adventures: Episode 3: What Can Backend Code Even Do?

What went wrong with dev.to

dev.to was a huge disappointment. I tried to post episode 4, and it just outright refused to accept it, or even preview with "invalid markdown detected" error.

It wouldn't even give me a hint where was that "invalid markdown", so I had to delete parts of the posts, until I got it down to a single line, then simplified a bit:

Yeah, any code block with date: in it just crashes their engine. I tried to throw some backslashes in various places, but that didn't fix it.

I could maybe change code to say "da" + "te:", but that's really stupid for a code blogging platform.

Unless this gets fixed, I really don't see myself using it, especially as I like doing much weirder things with code than printing some URLs.

I'm not sure if there's any place where I can report the bugs where they'd actually read them and maybe fix that (for what it's worth, I tweeted at them).

What went wrong with hashnode

Hashnode let me post everything all right, but there's another problem. There doesn't seem to be any place where people can see all my blog posts. If I'm not logged in, my profile page looks like this:

Like, where the hell is my blog?

I suspect that maybe I need to go through the whole "setup your blog" process to get such page, but this really wasn't clear when I started. I thought by posting blogposts I'd already have some kind of blog created, but maybe that's not how it works?

What's next

I'll try to see if hashnode is fixable, and if dev.to actually responds to this bug.

I still have an option of using external markdown converter and posting here, even though it's a messy process. I'm not sure which other blogging platforms I can try.

I want to continue Electron Adventures, but I might take a short break to resolve these technical problems first.