Finding a convenient mobile workflow for writing posts on a static blog

I wanted to have a more convenient way of adding posts to the blog that didn’t involve so much editing, dealing with git, jekyll and everything. Something so that I could just jot down some notes on my phone whenever and have them up in no time. This is what I’ve found at the moment, I may extend this in the future and feel free to send suggestions my way (talk to me at dci@c.im on the fediverse).

JekyllEx

An Android app that is supposed to manage Jekyll blogs. Installed it but couldn’t get it to launch, it just crashed :(

isomorphic-git

I didn’t find any other promising phone apps and didn’t want to deal with developing one myself so I started looking into what tools I would need to write a simple webapp to clone my blog, edit it and send updates. Managing a git repo from the browser seemed daunting but I found this amazing library, isomorphic-git, which makes it a breeze. It is very simple to use and leverages modern features of JS in the browser (the author even has an equivalent implementation of Node’s fs for the browser!), so huge shoutout for that.

StackEdit

After seeing that the git part of the problem could be solved, I looked into Markdown editors, and I came across StackEdit which I had already used ages ago.

…and it turns out StackEdit has full support for GitHub/Gitlab repos! I’m just writing this post on it right now and I can push it to the repo so that GitHub takes care of compiling and adding it to the blog.

StackEdit also offers PWA capabilities so you can pin it as an icon on your homescreen.

So this is looking great for writing quick and short stories more frequently :)