Setting Up dev.to Automation: Pitfalls and Discoveries

Automating blog publishing sounds straightforward until you bump into the little quirks that each platform guards like state secrets. Over the past few days, I've been wiring up a workflow to publish NES game reviews to dev.to automatically—and I've learned more than a few lessons the hard way. Here's what I've discovered. The Tag Rule That No One Mentions You'd think tags are simple: just a list of words, right? dev.to has other ideas. First, they must be alphanumeric only—no hyphens, no dashes, no special characters of any kind. I found this out after a 422 Unprocessable Entity error sat there mocking me while I stared at "action-platformer" in my tag list. Nope. It has to be "actionplatformer" . Learn to live with it. Second, you can only have four tags per article. Five? Rejected. I get it—they want concise, focused articles—but when you're describing a game, it's tempting to throw in every relevant descriptor. Now I'm ruthless: pick the most specific four. For NES games, that's us