Use GitHub as asset repository for your articles (a.k.a. hot linking images to GitHub)
The workflow of publishing in Substack automatically from the RSS feed of a GitHub page (that I published yesterday in this article) satisfies my needs.
Missing image in my local and Substack, not on Github
Those with a keen eye, however, might have noticed that one of the images in the article was missing in Substack:
The place of the missing image is pointed by the arrow (pointing to nothingness)
I did notice quite quickly that the image was missing from Substack; interestingly it showed on Github Pages. What a bummer, I thought. What now?
Imgur was the problem
I slept it over, happy that the image failed to show in my local. That hinted to the solution.
Next day, I googled hotlinking from Imgur.
It turned out that Imgur has some restrictive policies to hotlink from blogs:
Imgur has some restrictive policies
Github pages as asset repository
It didn’t took me long to realize that I could host the images in a Github page. And so, I did.
I created an assets repository on my GitHub and enabled GitHub Pages:
My assets repository in Github Pages
Now, I can hotlink images from my blog (Substack, Medium, Dev.to, even GutHub pages itself) to my asset repository. For free I get version control of my assets and complete control over them (other than privacy, I guess, since it’s a public read-only repository).
I hope GitHub pages remains free forever.
Will GitHub Pages remain free forever for public repositories?
A quick peek seem to point it will be free - hopefully with hotlinking - forever:
It appears GitHub Pages is remaining free - hopefully with hotlinking
However, in case it does not, it feels good to know that I have all my assets and articles locally saved and backup to the cloud.
More automation needed for a more convenient article writing experience
All is about experience now a days (user experience, developer experience, etc-experience), and my current experience for image handling is not the best.
For each image in this article, I had to:
Take a screenshot
Save it to local directory (preferably with a “hyphened-name”)
Add, commit and push to the repo
Build a link to the asset..
Phew! It’s only 4 steps but for every image it’s a hassle.
So I’ll do a script to automate these tasks so I only have to 1) take screenshot 2) type regular name 3) paste into article.
I’ll share more in the near future when it get’s implemented.