Blogging With Hugo From My iPad

I’ve been doing most of my writing lately on my iPad. For me it’s just the right device for blogging without distraction.

On WordPress I confess that blogging on iPad was easier. It took me a while to get my workflow right when I switched to Hugo just because it involves more than just opening a website and typing in Safari. That said, after almost 3 months of trial and error I’m pretty happy with my iPad workflow now and would dare say that it is almost as easy as it was on WordPress.

For Hugo my workflow comes down to a few steps on two different apps: Working Copy and iA Writer. These allow me to write and edit and then push my work to GitHub which automatically publishes new posts to Cloudflare Pages.

As for the workflow, given I post 3-times per week I’ve taken to crafting 3 post stubs every Saturday with empty front-matter and named after the date of the post.

Then, usually the night before I publish, I write my post on the appropriate date and fill out the rest of front-matter as needed, renaming the file to date-title.md.

If I need a photo it’s a bit weirder but not much harder. I try to use my own photos where needed so I just export from the photos app and copy it to the appropriate folder in my repo, once again using Working Copy to push the changes.

Is this workflow perfect, no.

That said, it actually has some advantages over what I used with WordPress in that using an app to write in Markdown is far more stable than writing in WordPress’ block editor. In addition, all the content is portable to any system I might want to move it to later, should I grow tired of Hugo.

If I could change anything it would be better linking between posts and attachments such as pictures as it is far too easy for me to get it wrong now, but as long as I pay attention it really isn’t a big deal.

For now, at least, at least it all works for me and I’m writing regularly. That’s all I can really ask for.