I don't know how that landed in my cart

Last week I had one of those "Don't think, just do it" decisions where I bought a StreamDeck. For anyone who is not familiar with what a StreamDeck is - It's a small device, you connect with your computer that has buttons with an LCD screen behind it. You can then program these buttons to do all kinds of fun things.

Isn't that a Gamer thing?

Well, the StreamDeck was indeed developed for the Gaming- or more precisely for the Streaming-Niche. If you look at the Plugins that already exist that allow you to connect to software - most of them are Streaming related. But that doesn't mean you have to use it just for that case.

But in the end, it's just a thing with buttons that can do whatever you want them to do. It just needs the integrations.

What else did I set up?

Because I am using it for Gaming and my Gaming-Stream - most things I have set up are also Gaming-related. I did also put in my Spotify playlists and the music control for my most listened-to lists.

I also have the standard Hardware Monitor, a clock, and network testing on some buttons to save the time opening the command window to do a ping test when my Internet acts german again (for anyone not from Germany - our internet infrastructure is a mess).

Why set up something for hashnode? It's just markdown

It's an experiment if I am completely honest. I want to see how it affects the speed I can write my articles and how it might affect my overall productivity. Overall it's good to mix up your work routines once in a while for them not to become boring or stale. If this is something I can archive it with - even better. This is how I have set up my StreamDeck for using hashnode.

Using StreamDeck for Blogging

The Blog button simply opens my hashnode-blog at Tiia Rocks The new post opens a browser tab for the article editor. In fact, I did press the button to write just this article. The Dashboard button redirects to Hashnode directly, because once logged in, the website turns into your personal dashboard. The h1, h2, h3 buttons are basically self-explanatory, they simply post the amount of number signs needed to style the Heading.

The Embed button posts %[Paste link to embed] into my article so I can easily embed tweets or other supported services. I do also have added a Link button after setting everything up which will post [Text](Link) into my article just like a click on the button in the toolbar would do.

The last two buttons will include the markdown for inserting code into articles. I used the 1 line code button to style the embed and link commands in this article.

While the setup might be a little overkill for the Headings, I feel like especially with the code snippet implementation and the embed, it will save me time because I always had to look those up in the hashnode Guide.

Is it worth it tho?

I tested it on this article and I really liked the workflow it created while typing. While it's probably not worth it to buy a StreamDeck for only blogging, I think it is worth it to set up little shortcuts when you already have a StreamDeck or maybe another Macro-Keyboard.

By the way: My goal for 2022 is to write at least 50 blogposts here on hashnode. I wanted to keep the number realistic to my workload. As a way to hold myself accountable - this is 2/50! We're getting there :)

Feel free to follow me on Twitter and start a conversation there. I am always happy to meet new people!