Streamline Publishing with a Claude Code Skill
TL;DR: publishing-kit packages the whole publishing lifecycle as a Claude Code skill. Write one markdown file, and it builds the dev.to, AWS Builder Center, Medium and LinkedIn versions, checks them, and posts the ones that have an API. This article, its cover and all four of its artifacts were produced by the thing the article is about — dogfooding all the way down. More on that at the end.…
Publishing an article across multiple platforms can be a cumbersome process, involving a multitude of steps and technical challenges. Streamline Publishing with a Claude Code skill aims to simplify this process by automating many of the tasks involved in publishing a technical article to multiple destinations such as dev.to, AWS Builder Center, Medium, and LinkedIn.
The publishing-kit package, developed by xbill9, serves as both a Claude Code skill and a set of small scripts to handle the various aspects of the publishing lifecycle. By writing a single markdown file, the system can automatically build the article for dev.to, AWS Builder Center, Medium, and LinkedIn, check the content, and post the articles that have an API. This workflow, referred to as dogfooding, demonstrates how the article itself can be produced using the same tool that handles its publication.
The skill is responsible for teaching Claude the entire publishing lifecycle, while the scripts perform the tasks that a language model should not handle manually. Some of the key components include:
1. Build the artifacts: The markdown file becomes the dev.to markdown, Builder Center version with stripped emojis, Medium HTML with tables rendered to PNGs, and a LinkedIn post.
2. Cover creation: make-cover.py draws the cover illustration and renders it at various geometries, creating files named with a hash of their bytes. It also checks which sizes survive a 320px feed card.
3. Fact verification: check-facts.py traces every number in the article against evidence files and reports which ones are not supported by any source.
4. Pre-flight checks: preflight.py runs a series of tests to ensure the article meets the necessary criteria, such as proper formatting, front matter, and matching URLs.
5. API-driven publishing: The skill uses Claude to publish the article on platforms that have APIs, such as dev.to, while handling manual processes for those that do not, like AWS Builder Center and Medium.
Key considerations include handling different sizes and formats for each platform, encoding the details of the publishing process, and ensuring that all artifacts are properly fetched and served.
To install the publishing-kit, users can either use the plugin marketplace or clone the repository and link the skill. The skill requires Python 3 with Pillow for cover and table rendering, a dev.to API key, and a public repository to store the article directory. In most cases, users will not directly run the scripts, as Claude does so automatically. When manual intervention is needed, users can query the skill for its current location using skill-footprint.py --where.
In summary, the Claude Code skill and associated scripts provide an efficient and streamlined approach to publishing technical articles across multiple platforms, eliminating much of the manual labor and ceremony involved in the process.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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