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Announcing Quick Posts!

·2 mins
site updates Tech

My latest site publishing workflow has been working fairly well so far. I’ve more or less settled on using Drafts as my input source for post ideas, with an action to push to my site’s local repo on iOS with the required frontmatter automatically generated. From there, I edit in 1Writer, an iOS Markdown editor, then publish using Working Copy (by means of an iOS Shortcut.)

This has worked well, but since Working Copy isn’t available (or really necessary) on Mac, the Drafts action wouldn’t work on a Mac. So I’ve resorted to just copying and pasting the text into a text file on the local repository on my Mac, then using the GitHub desktop client to push. Which… is fine, but I wanted to make it a little more seamless between the Mac and iOS.

I also found I wanted to sometimes have the ability to write a short post write in Drafts and publish right to the site without any further editing.

So I got to work on a couple of Drafts actions to let me do both of these things on either Mac or iOS using the same Action.

I was able to do this easily, because one of the cool thing about Drafts is that you can enable not only certain actions to be visible or not on MacOS and iOS, but also certain steps within the action.

So I now have a “Quick Post” action in Draft that will:

  1. Add Hugo frontmatter, grabbing any tags I’ve added in the Draft
  2. Create a file with it in my site’s repository
  3. Commit and push to GitHub (where it gets published to my site through GitHub actions.)

Steps 2 and 3 are different steps depending on whether it runs on MacOS or iOS to handle how my repository works between both platforms.

This is my very first Quick Post, and also my very first full test of Quick Posts! If you’re reading this, the workflow worked (or it worked after many attempts. I guess we’ll see.)

I also have a “Draft post” action that will do everything except commit and push, and will mark the post as a draft so it won’t get built on the site in case it’s accidentally pushed. This is where I’ll push work in progress drafts that are a little longer and where I’ll be editing on a nice, focused Markdown editor like Ulysses or iA Writer.