Blogging on iPad

Last weekend, I tried to finish the setup of this blog (layout and images) but I had only my iPad mini with me, but because everything was hosted on Github I thought it would be easy to do it.

So I googled a little bit about people blogging with Jekyll and iPad. Most of them combine and I did not find any good free solution¹. Besides I needed to edit the config to resolve the issue with the first article's image (too big, needing to be resized).

Config and Images

Though I manage to commit directly on Github and see the result of the generated page, I needed at one point edit my Gemfile so to regenerate the Gemfile.lock, and that was definitely not possible on a simple editor. I needed a server, hopefully I remembered the Cloud9 service and could have my own console to run commands like bundle install and even serving the website on it.

One issue though is that it does not support mobile devices yet:

• Can't copy/paste
• Can't run a command again
• ...

After a few tryouts, I ended up using the jekyll-picture-tag plugin in order to have different image sizes depending on the resolution of the device (responsive design).

It worked well locally but Github was still failing, because it does not support all plugins². The only solution then was to use Travis to build and publish the site ; quite straight forward with the rake-jekyll gem.

Thoughts

Create a mobile app that would:

• retrieve website content from github
• build and serve the website locally. See GCDServer
• create/edit articles
• publish article

Create a development friendly keyboard extension (arrows, ESC, CTRL keys...)

Next steps

• Post to Twitter the article link when published - should be easy with travis now.
• Add comments system with Github issues