Posting to Jekyll from the iPhone

How I post to this blog from mobile

Posted by Giulio Magnifico on Sunday, January 1, 2023

As you may know, this blog is running on my VPS on DigitalOcean using Jekyll to generate the site, and in order to make a new post, it’s not that easy because I have to write a Markdown file, upload to the posts folder via FTP and update Jekyll via SSH.

Well, this is not complicated but do the limitations from iOS is a bit tricky. But I absolutely love to write when I’m making a walk in the nature, so I had to figure out how to post from my iPhone. And there are all the (few) steps:

First I create a new Markdown file using One Markdown app (App Store link):

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And I save it to One Markdown iCloud folder to have the file synced with my other devices. Then I go to Files app, I copy the just created file and I paste it into the Local folder of the Koder app (App Store link):

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Then I simply open the file in Koder and I upload it to my blog SSD:

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Now I can use the built-in Koder Terminal/SSH feature (see the small icon at the bottom), but it lacks the arrows and other special characters of the keyboard. So I prefer to use Termius (App Store link). I connect to my VPS and I run the command to build Jekyll with the new file: IMG_8422

And here’s the post, all these steps take 1/2 minutes and are annoying.

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This is a bit complex and long, and I hope to have something like an app to do it all in one, more friction-less, but I’ve never found another way.

If you know a better/easier way to make all these steps in one shot only, please tell me in the comments! Thanks and happy new year 🍾