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iambateman

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.

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Take a look at these, which provide exactly that:

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

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

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

https://standardnotes.com/

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 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 ---

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.

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