Automating the most annoying aspects of blogging | Hacker News Reader

Automating the most annoying aspects of blogging

blog.gingerbeardman.com

43 pointsmsephton31 comments

I have similar feelings, so I created this: https://tinymind.me

Some highlights: 1. Drag and drop to upload images, and automatically save to your github, no need for imgur. 2. Supports Markdown and LaTex. 3. Free & open source, your data stored in your Github repository.

Drawback: You need to authorize access to your public repo on Github.

and the source code here: https://github.com/mazzzystar/tinymind

Imagine a image, not being saved, instead all you have is a tag-prompt - recreating the image on demand, if a older blog post is loaded.. Then again, how many fingers m i holding up?

So the image needs to be regenerated every time the post is read? Sounds wasteful to me.

Interesting idea, if the seed is set differently, would that mean that each person sees a different image? Like a lottery.

Very cool! If it had existed a handful of years ago I probably would be using it. I started out using Forestry which was pretty cool, then was closed, at which point I decided to edit everything locally.

But I'll keep an eye on your repo. Good luck with it!

I an not getting the benefit here, apart from adding some cool technology.

How is al of this easer than just having a script that uses ftp/sftp/rclone/rsync/webDav to upload ht images to the CDN?

You could make it part of your publishing step, so you would not have to run the script yourself every time.

With the solution presented it is all automatic on git push; I don't have to run the script manually. So, I think perhaps you've misunderstood some of the post.

You suggest doing an automatic upload (which could only be done from specific machines) and I'm doing an automatic download (to the target server, so changes can be pushed from any machine!)

The most annoying aspect of blogging for me is terrible phone support.

If someone can figure out how to get iOS Notes published on the internet, I would love that workflow.

Might be able to find services that publish posts from emails. Then it's just a matter of writing an email from your phone.

> Might be able to find services that publish posts from emails.

Posterous[0] used to do that and it was good. Then they sold their souls to Twitter and, obviously, all the good went away after a year.

(one of the founders then launched Posthaven[1] but a) fool me once, etc., and b) he's an intensely problematic lunatic.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous

[1] https://posthaven.com

Might not be a blog, but hxxps://daft.social posts are done by sending an e-mail.

P.S. Not affiliated

I haven’t used this service, but it does have some kind of integrated publishing feature.

https://standardnotes.com/

Take a look at these, which provide exactly that:

1. https://docs.alto.so/mac 2. https://montaigne.io/

I did an experiment with ChatGPT for this recently.

I run my blog using Django, and the Django Admin has a feature where you can construct a link to an "add post" page with query string parameters that pre-populate that form.

I set up a GPT (a custom ChatGPT with a system prompt) with these instructions:

    You help me write new items for my link blog
    by generating URLs to the Django admin that
    prefill the new blog entry form

    The URL you generate always starts like this:
    
    https://simonwillison.net/admin/blog/blogmark/add/?use_markdown=1

    Then you add more URL encoded pairs:

    link_title is the title of the link
    link_url is the URL
    slug is the URL slug used on my site - it
    should be the title in lower case with dashes
    instead of spaces and with stop words removed
    via_url is optional - it’s the via URL
    via_title is optional too
    commentary is the longest field - it’s the
    markdown for my blog entry. It should usually
    include more markdown links.

    I will paste in notes, you turn them into a
    link to this URL

Now I can copy and paste rough notes from my iPhone notes app - with the title of a link, the URL, a bunch of notes and maybe a "via XXX" text at the bottom - and it will generate a working link like this one:

    https://simonwillison.net/admin/blog/blogmark/add/?use_markdown=1&link_title=Zero-latency%20SQLite%20storage%20in%20every%20Durable%20Object&link_url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.cloudflare.com%2Fsqlite-in-durable-objects%2F&slug=zero-latency-sqlite-storage-durable-object&commentary=Kenton%20Varda%20introduces%20the%20next%20iteration%20of%20Cloudflare%27s%20%5BDurable%20Object%5D(https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.cloudflare.com%2Fdurable-objects%2F)%20platform%2C%20which%20recently%20upgraded%20from%20a%20key%2Fvalue%20store%20to%20a%20full%20relational%20system%20based%20on%20SQLite.%0A%0AThis%20is%20a%20fascinating%20piece%20of%20distributed%20system%20design%2C%20enabling%20a%20really%20interesting%20way%20to%20architect%20a%20large%20scale%20application.%0A%0AThe%20key%20idea%20behind%20Durable%20Objects%20is%20to%20colocate%20application%20logic%20with%20the%20data%20it%20operates%20on.%20A%20Durable%20Object%20is%20a%20code%20instance%20on%20the%20same%20physical%20host%20as%20the%20SQLite%20database%20that%20it%20operates%20on%2C%20resulting%20in%20blazingly%20fast%20read%20and%20write%20performance.

That example won't work for anyone who isn't me because you need to be signed into the Django Admin to view the link, but here's a screenshot of what I get:

https://gist.github.com/simonw/3bb63ff855854c0bc7856567f7a5e...

I haven't been using it though, because it takes too long for ChatGPT to type out that URL one URL-escaped character at a time.

You should aim for something easy to generate like a YAML snippet, and then upload that.

I have built a series of shortcuts on iOS that call out to Azure OpenAI to provide me with two kinds of things:

- a YAML entry for my resource/link tables with title, date, url, link text, and a notes field that summarizes the content

- a link blog content draft with all the front matter and a bulleted list of an article’s summary and a few topics I want to cover when writing the actual post

Both go into the clipboard and the notes fields in the Reminders app so I can either move straight into an editor to post (which happens via git) or pick them up later on a Mac.

So anywhere I find something interesting to write about, I just use the iOS share sheet to capture it.

Here’s what it suggested as front matter for your comment:

--- from: Rui Carmo date: 2024-10-15 09:00:01 title: Experimenting with ChatGPT and Django | Hacker News x-link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844748 tags: django, chatgpt, technology ---

I build https://quotion.co just for this purpose, you can publish blog with just Apple Notes. Feel free to give it a shot

blogging from your phone is a sign if insanity.

I do it often, to get a draft down or an edit done. But not really from blank file to published post.

I agree, this is one of the reasons I moved off of html to Gemini/Gopher. I just completed the move.

Maintenance and OS agnostic. All I need to do is add an entry to a text file on my local computer then kick of an scp script to copy it to the server.

My WEB hosting used cpanel (they just moved to something similar) and I need to upload it manually. Never mind the conversion if the text to html.

How is tag quality evaluated by the tag picker or audit command? That is one of the most annoying aspects to keep track of for me, and it seems like this tool does not address that at all.

I'm not sure what you mean? It simply lists existing tags from all my blog posts, so they've already got my seal of approval as I've used them before. I could add "number of times used", but I've not needed it. It's not synthesizing or hallucinating new tags from content. If I want a new tag, well, I think it up myself, though after many years of blogging it's not a common occurrence.

I see. In my blogging experience it is easy to accidentally create tags that apply to just one article, or, perhaps worse, apply to such a broad range of articles that they don't have anything in common beyond the tag. Figuring that out for a large number of tags and a large number of articles is annoying to me!

> Improved “noun” replacement, automatically-emphasised words (3 Sep)

Is there an outline somewhere of what this actually entails?

I think there's an example in the next line with YouTube being in italics

Almost! The "nouns" are manually entered words/phrases that I want the system to automatically emphasise throughout the post. I would miss many instances of words whilst doing manual markdown formatting, so it's another case of automating annoying and error prone work. My code is on GitHub, but it's just a small Jekyll plugin that uses regex to automatically wrap specified phrases in emphasis. Nothing groundbreaking, but a useful time and error saver!

Modern CSS makes SASS mostly redundant imo.

I agree. Here the use of SASS is inherited and I don't see much benefit in redoing it.

Why not just use Substack. It's great

Because it’s full of people who think it’s great?

Seriously now, content mills like Medium and Substack are simply not appealing to people who want more control over how their site renders. Or in fact, who want any sort of control over their content.

I like my content in Markdown on my own git repository, thank you.

Glad you like it, but it's a million miles from my ideals. I want my content to be under my control and free to read without obstruction. My blog loads hundreds of times faster and uses far less bandwidth than a Substack newsletter blog.

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