Blogging From Anywhere

The simpler it is to write and publish content to your website, the more likely it is that you will. I don’t make the rules, that’s just human nature.

Most of the time I write on my MacBook, but there’s no technical reason preventing me from publishing from my iPad or iPhone, it just requires some setup the first time.

Today I picked up the new 13” iPad Pro and the matching Magic Keyboard, so I figured it was a great time to publish a little article from the new mobile setup with my first impressions of the new hardware and the apps I use to write on the go.

2024 iPad Pro

The iPad is a device I want to love. It’s incredibly beautiful and capable hardware, but a lot of people (myself included) find it laying on a bookshelf or desk unused most of the time. This generation has a screen I absolutely couldn’t pass up, so I’m giving the iPad another try, maybe it’ll stick this time!

form factor

Apple didn’t exaggerate, this iPad is quite a bit thinner and lighter than the prior generations. It’s noticeable from the moment you pick it up, it feels nice. The 13” is still too big to comfortably use with one hand, but it’s a huge improvement. I played with the 11” version at the Apple store and while it is also thinner and lighter, it doesn’t feel like quite as much of a leap from the last generation¹.

display

Taking a step back for a moment, the iPad Pro models have had incredible screens for many years. This year’s screen is no exception: it’s crisp, bright, and has great colors. In normal use, it’s business as usual. However, once you fire up a movie, it’s quite a step up! The blooming of the Mini LED display is gone, and the contrast and colors are exactly what you’d expect from a high quality OLED panel. HDR movie content is seriously impressive, the brights are really bright, and there’s good c. I fired up some of my go-to test movies² and they all looked amazing.

magic keyboard

Although it’s an accessory, I think the new Magic Keyboard is an important piece of this year’s upgrade story. It’s a really nice improvement over the previous version for the same [high] price. It feels really sturdy and the function row is a welcome addition, especially the media keys while multitasking. Right now I am writing full-screen in iA Writer while watching the Boston Red Sox play the Tampa Bay Rays, and having those controls right at my fingertips without needing to go to control center is super nice³.

writing setup

The way I set up my blog allows me to be device-agnostic to write and publish to it. It’s powered by a static site generator called Hugo that generates all of the HTML pages based off the templates I’ve set up, and it’s hosted on Netlify. Netlify is configured to observe changes to my site’s git repository so that the site is automatically built and published any time I push a new change. So as long as I can commit my writing to GitHub, I can publish articles.

On my iPad, I’m using a few different apps to do this:

• Working Copy allows me to check out my site’s git repo and expose it to other apps as a normal folder on the filesystem using the “file provider” API
• iA Writer is my preferred writing environment – it has plenty of power but happily gets out of the way to let me write undistracted
• Runestone is my go to for modifying any non-prose such as templates, styling, or configs

That’s all I need! It’s a little more involved than a platform like Wordpress or Medium, but for the control I have over my entire setup, it’s pretty straightforward and can be accessed from anywhere I have a network connection.