Blogging from an iPad is possible - here's how

My mind is full of ideas that I’d like to write about. However, putting aside the writer’s block, it is not always easy to put them on a piece of paper and publish.

It might be more of an excuse than anything else, but I was particularly interested in is making it writing and publishing from an iPad rather than through the laptop.

Back in 2018, with the help of Marija, I set up this blog on the Jekyll platform. On one side, Jekyll is great as it allowed the site to be hosted on Github and make it painless in terms of deployment. On the other side, Jekyll is and was sometimes a pain in the ass for a day to day publishing. It is not as easy as Wordpress or other CMSs where you come, write, publish and go to the next one.

For Jekyll, I needed to go to Terminal, learn git and navigate through git commit, git push, git status, git add and various other commands. It might seem hard (it’s not), but it is a pain in the ass and another step.

So, in order to avoid that, I Googled how other folks do it on their iPad where, technically, there is no Terminal.

Thankfully, there were a bunch of people that described their journey, how they chose their apps and how their workflows work. For example, Mike depicted his here and Arthur depicted his here.

There are similar steps that both take:

• write the outline and the draft somewhere
• get the final version of the blog post on an iPad
• add and edit some kind of a visual
• add it to Github
• push it out into the world

So, that is pretty much what I did:

• I’m using 1Writer to write and edit the final the draft blog post
• use Working Copy to add the visuals to the right folder in the repository, to import the draft blog post and to push it out

So far it works - let’s see if this will improve my writing discipline.

Written on June 25th, 2022 by Marko Srsan