If you're a fan of Notion and have been thinking about using it to manage your blog posts while automatically publishing them to Hashnode whenever they're ready, this article is for you.

Before we dive into the specifics, let's take a moment to understand what Make is and how it compares to other popular automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT.

Make, formerly known as Integromat, is a versatile automation platform that allows users to design, build, and automate workflows called "scenarios." These scenarios can connect various apps and services, enabling seamless data transfer and task execution. Make stands out for its visual approach to automation, representing workflows as a series of interconnected modules.

Compared to Zapier and IFTTT, Make offer several unique advantages:

• Visual Interface. Make provides a flowchart-like UI interface to easily visualize and create a complex workflow at glance.

• Flexibility. It allows for branching paths, loops, and conditional logic, giving users more control over their automations.

• Better pricing model. Make’s pricing model is based on the number of operations performed. This is more cost-effective for users with complex but infrequently run automations.

In this article, we'll harness the power of Make to create an automated workflow that retrieves your blog posts from Notion and publishes them directly to Hashnode. This integration will save you valuable time and ensure a smooth, consistent publishing process.

Building Hashnode Custom App

The official Hashnode module is unfortunately not available on Make yet. The good news is that it is possible to create our own custom app on Make. This custom app relies on Hashnode GraphQL API to perform query or mutation actions.

For this use case, I have built the custom Hashnode app which supports modules to create a new post and update an existing post. In the future, I might add other modules as I see fit for my use cases.

If you want to try it, here is the link to the custom app → Hashnode Make Module .

Building the Scenario

Now it is time to create the scenario. Make makes it possible to easily create a scenario with a very easy-to-use UI. It might be awkward to use at first, but I think the learning curve is not steep.

Integrating Notion with Hashnode is not as easy as I thought. Hashnode accepts content in Markdown format, while Notion uses a different kind of data format. It uses the concept of blocks, and each block represents a different content type. For example, a block can be a paragraph, an image, a list, or a heading. Hence, before we are able to publish the content from Notion to Hashnode, we have to convert Notion’s blocks to Markdown. That’s where the complexity of the scenario comes from.

Here is the complete setup of my scenario. Currently, it only supports blocks with heading, paragraph, image, list items, and link types. Of course, I will update the scenario to support different types of blocks.

Notes

Make’s pricing model is based on the number of operations performed. Right now, the scenario is not very efficient in terms of the number of operations. Each block of Notion is going to consume around 8 operations (and can be more if it is a paragraph that has lots of annotations) in this scenario. If you have a blog post with many blocks, the number of operations consumed can be very high. That’s why it is important to combine several paragraphs or blocks into one block on Notion to reduce the number of operations. (Always use SHIFT+ENTER when writing a new paragraph on Notion).

How to Use

Simply create a Database and connect it to Make. Here is the template of the database → Link .

What’s Next

I will keep updating the scenario to support different types of blocks while trying to optimize the number of operations. I also plan to extend the scenario to support other tasks such as automatically sharing new posts on social media.

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Thanks to Make, automating my blogging workflow has never been easier. Using a low-code approach and drag-and-drop operations, I was able to streamline my blogging workflow by automatically publishing my blog posts on Hashnode from Notion. Having this robust automation allows you to focus on what matters most - creating great content - while the technical aspects of publishing are handled seamlessly in the background. I hope that this article can be helpful!