This has been marked as the biggest downside to using Jekyll. Once I started telling people I was moving the Wiki to Jekyll, a great many of them were cautionary about this issue.
How do you post from your phone or iPad?
The answer is that I don’t.
I won’t lie. Mobile posting is a pain. Since I don’t have Jekyll running on my server, I can’t edit a file there and regenerate. If I had that it would all be a lot easy. In my case, since I’m using it as a non-blog it’s never the place I need to post mission critical things. Besides, if you’ve ever tried to keep your pretty formatted WordPress site updated when you want a custom crafted excerpt and a featured image, from your iPad, I gotta tell you … it sucks.
And that’s WordPress, something that has a dedicated, usable, app for iOS. WordPress is also pretty okay in mobile. People like Ryan Boren spends a great deal of time caring about mobile usage. WordPress has gotten slower on the admin side in the last decade, but it’s gotten more responsive and agile at the same time.
MediaWiki not so much. Editing should be a lot easier, seeing as there’s no ‘admin’ back end to mess with things, but for whatever reason MediaWiki was always terrible on my iPad. It was next to unusable on my iPhone. Even with their default themes (remember, with MediaWiki you see the front end theme on page edits) it was dodgy.
Furthermore, what did I need to post? This is a wiki-type documentation site. It is rarely, if ever, updated on the fly. It houses long form news articles. There are recaps of TV episodes, explanations of humanitarian events, and reports of events. There is no live blogging. There is no quick off the cuff journaling. It’s storytelling.
So here’s my ‘mobile’ workflow.
- Write the content in something, probably Byword
- Email it to myself
- Probably rewrite the whole thing in longer form, with design and fancy things
- Post
I could probably streamline that better if I saved from Byword to Dropbox and had that automatically copy over (suggestions welcome), but I don’t really write from my iPad that much. I usually send myself an email with six or seven links and a note to ‘Import these things…’
