Blogging through iA Writer - only! - ubiquitously

posted on 2012-02-15

The motivation

This is a kind of bootstrapping post about my new writing experience. With the help of some simple yet powerful tools, it is possible to simplify blogging to its true essence: ideas and a text editor.

It may take a bit of hacking to glue things together but, concerning the user experience, this is how streamlined it gets:

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And here are the tools used:

• Jekyll, as the static site generator.
• GitHub, to host the blog using git for deploy.
• Dropbox, to save new posts from any device.
• iA Writer, to edit posts on the Mac and iPad.

Jekyll is a static site generator written by Github's co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. (You can find more information here and follow this tutorial from Jekyll-Bootstrap project, which is itself cloneable from Github to help you get started).

Github pages will recognize your Jekyll-enabled website which automatically rebuilds itself when new changes are pushed to the repository (More information here).

The act of creating a new post becomes as simple as saving a new file inside _posts, written in any of Jekyll's supported formats (i'm using John Gruber's Markdown for its ease of use).

The last bit of glue is a mix of Dropbox and OS X magic. Linking a folder in Dropbox to the local Git repository enables posting from every device where you have configured Dropbox and a text editor. To fully automate the process i use Automator's Folder Actions to watch the Dropbox linked folder and git commit every change. A simple Git hook goes all the way to GitHub, git pushing on every commit.

The experience

In the end, to make a post on the blog, i need to:

1. Open iA Writer on the Mac or iPad.
2. Edit my post using Markdown syntax.
3. Save it to Dropbox.
4. Wait 5 seconds for it to show up on Github.

iA Writer is a joy to use on the Mac but it's even more profoundly inspiring when used on the go with just an iPad and an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard: where beautiful design meets true simplicity!

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Mark Weiser in “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century”

For comments and questions, follow me on twitter @tjsousa

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