Resolutions
Warning: Obligatory blog post reflecting on past 8,765 hours or possibly one musing on the upcoming 525,948 minutes ahead. Either way, proceed with caution.
This coming year one of the things I’d really like to focus on getting better at is keeping up with my blogging. Throughout the year, Nick and I get to work on some really cool stuff. Often times I let these little projects go by without really sharing anything about them. Which is kind of disappointing in a few ways, since often times, they end up becoming something others can benefit from.
So this year, I’m going to make a more concerted effort to post more often. I’ve even put together a new workflow to help me stay on top of it.
Simplifying… Sort of…
This past March, on my birthday, Steve Jobs thoughtfully decided to release the iPad 2. So naturally, I chose to spend part of my day waiting in line. Ever since, my shiny new iPad has become an important part of my work. Whatever things I can streamline enough to get done on the iPad I usually jump at the opportunity. Blogging seemed like a natural choice.
The challenge in this notion came from my choice in blogging platform. When I chose Tumblr for my blog, I chose it because it’s simple. In most respects this is true. However, it’s not the case when trying to blog on your iPad. The iPhone app that Tumblr released is really nice, but there’s nothing out there that’s really wonderful for the iPad yet, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Unsimplification
My primary blogging tool would of course have to be a text editor. There are loads of good ones out there on the app store. I ended up settling on Deadalus Touch. It’s got some really nice features, yet has a super clean, minimalistic interface. It also seems to handle markdown as a primary means of editing text very nicely. In fact, this is the first post I’m typing in Deadalus Touch. When I’m ready to post, I can export this all as markdown and paste it into Tumblr’s markdown editor.
To host images, I’m finally getting around to using Flickr. I just made myself set up my account to host images. Flickr, though, shares a fairly significant problem with Tumblr when it comes to working with it on the iPad. The iPhone app for Flickr is great, but there’s not an iPad equivalent. No easy means to upload my blog images to Flickr. Which brings me to the last piece of the puzzle…
There’s this nifty new tool that’s been making it’s rounds on the interwebs called ifttt (if this then that). It’s nothing short of brilliant. ifttt is a central place for various Internet services you use every day. They hook into these service APIs and allow you to set up workflows. So for my blog, I set up a “task” that will use the Dropbox API and the Flickr API. If I upload an image to my public Dropbox folder, ifttt will upload that image to my Flickr photo stream. There are loads of other things you can do with this tool. It’s genius!
So that’s the gist of it. I’m hoping that by jumping through a few hoops right now to create this process will offer an end user interface that’s clean and minimal enough for me to blog anywhere on my iPad. So here’s to hoping that you’ll hear from me more regularly in 2012. See you guys next year.