Trying out an iOS publishing setup

Sat, 3 Nov 2018

It isn’t entirely comfortable yet, but I believe I now have a way to easily write and publish this site’s Jekyll-based posts from iOS — without writing code or actually running Jekyll. I can write in Ulysses and use the standard share feature to publish.

The key pieces are a customized version of Ryan Daigle’s iOS shortcut, the iOS app Working Copy (Ryan’s post explains how these two things work together) and Netlify, which automatically deploys my site from a GitHub repo with each commit. That’s one really nice thing about this setup — change management happens automatically.

Updating posts and working on other aspects of my site is possible on iOS too, although it’s even less comfortable: using Working Copy’s WebDAV Server feature as a remote site in Coda, I can edit easily ... but then I have to go through some motions to get the edits committed and pushed. Working Copy is a powerful app, but its Repository view does not inspire confidence. (And now that I’m done editing this post in Coda, let’s see if I can get it updated via Working Copy and live on my site...)