A blog workflow 2025 style

Let’s pull back the covers and go technical which I love to do. Given I’ve learned a bit from some documentation I’ve read already, let’s also give back. That’s very important!

So… here’s how this blog was born and made to fit my lifestyle:

Philosophy

I need to blog in my spare time only. Those spare times my be as ridiculous as on a bus or in bed. So it’s gotta be portable. So I’m doing it on my phone, or my tablet, or at a stretch in front of TV… my Chromebook.

I’m sorry to disappoint people, but yeah… Linux doesn’t quite fit in there (I weep for my Nokia N9 and the PinePhone didn’t quite get there for me), so that phone is an iPhone and the tablet is an iPad.

Minimizing my social accounts

I didn’t want to create another account, yet I am realistic enough to try to go where the people are, so I haven’t revived my Blogger, but I could. (I should probably put a redirect there at least).

I have a GitHub account so that’s where I’m at.

I’m familiar with static site generators, they are awesome, I never want to go back to a WordPress-like environment, it costs more, and is risky. Yes in the dark past I did have a site hacked in the past (weak password).

I have experience with Hugo from my partner’s site (go here, please), but I’m not going to swim against the tide, so ready-made Jekyll on GitHub Pages it is then.

But I definitely want to not be lazy and obvious, so I did at least seek out a different theme, and I’ve landed on Chirpy.

And here we are.

Writing posts

So I’m going to be writing posts on iPhones and iPads. Great. I’m going to be needing a Markdown editor and a Git client, and eventually a way of automating things.

I had some years ago bought a license to Working Copy and thus I’m using that and it’s extremely powerful.

As a tech enthusiast and developer, I of course early adopted iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, and the good bit here is the Notes app can Export to Markdown including images and links, the works. So out of the box creating of posts is handled.

Testing the blog out

This is where my Chromebook came in. Even though in all practicality I probably have zero readers, I wanted a test environnment. So I am using the Debian (my favourite) Linux environment built into my Chromebook for a local install of Jekyll for previewing things.

Automation

I’m looking into automating a few things and exploring further (it’s only been a couple of days) things. for example:

• I need to automate the front matter necessary for my posts. I expect I’ll either use Shortcuts or Pythonista or both to do this. (The file names need to change as well.)
• I need to automate some minor cleanups required from exporting from Notes. (The images need to be moved into my assets folder from the _posts folder.)
• I wonder if I can create and import a post template into Notes (I bet I can import plain text into Notes, but does it import Markdown, and will it leave the front matter unmolested?)

So there you have it. I’ll be sure to update you as I improve this process.

Bonus: Imagery

If you haven’t figured it out, I am not that good at drawing but I’m very confident at writing. But I have enough of an eye to realise that all of my text can look… well… bland.

So I’ve gone modern and I’m curating a “house style” and using Gemini to generate hero images for my posts. I know they appear a bit big on this theme, but tweaks like that for later.

I will assert my text content is not AI-generated.

🧑‍🚀