Publishing to Jekyll with Editorial on iOS

As a blog platform, Jekyll has a number of positive features:

1. The speed and security of a static site,
2. The convenience and future-proofing of plain text, and most importantly for educators,
3. Free hosting on GitHub.

For me, the one drawback has been finding a convenient way to post using my iPad. There are a number of good Markdown editors for iOS, so writing posts is very easy, but publishing them can be a challenge. Working Copy works well to manage the Git repository, but it doesn’t have the convenience that I wanted, and I really don’t need to store my whole Jekyll repository on the iPad. I can post using Prompt 2 and my Linux server on Digital Ocean. Neither of these are the simple write-and-post workflows that the iPad calls for, though.

Yesterday, I found this workflow by Max Jacobson. The first time it is run, it takes you to GitHub to generate an access token. After giving it the access token, the workflow will generate a file name in the correct format, prepare a commit message, and push the post to GitHub.¹

Now, I’m one step closer to being able to use the iPad as a desktop replacement.