dev.to Rejected My Cross-Post With a Cryptic Error, and the Cause Was a Picture
The Blogger post went out fine, like it always does. The dev.to cross-post that's supposed to follow it a few seconds later didn't. What I got back instead was {"error":"Invalid markdown detected!","status":422} -- no line number, no hint about which part of the "markdown" was invalid, just a flat rejection. The strange part was that the exact same script had successfully cross-posted a dozen times before. Nothing about the pipeline had changed. Only the post had. Ruling out the usual suspects My first assumption was a broken quote or an unescaped character somewhere in the post text -- the kind of thing that trips up a naive markdown parser. I went through the HTML looking for stray backticks, unmatched asterisks, anything that could read as a formatting directive gone wrong. Nothing stood out. The post was written the same way as every other one: a handful of <p> and <h3> tags, one <pre><code> block. dev.t...