Hello world! Out of nowhere I got an 10.5” iPad Pro. I did not quite need it. But still. I also got a Smart Keyboard and the Pencil with it. IPad Pro bundle was on sale last week — I managed to save around ₹18K on the purchase (after forking out ₹56K).

Anyway, now that I’ve got the iPad Pro I thought to make good use of it. Recently I started reading books on one side and taking notes on the GoodNotes app on other. The experience was nearly ideal. While reading a book, I always wanted to have a note taking mechanism on my side, and this set up enables me do that. But more on this later. Let’s talk about how I’ve been planning to set this iPad Pro for publishing new posts on my blog.

This blog runs on Hugo — a blazing fast static site generator and is hosted on Github. The continuous deployment is handled through Netlify. Currently the workflow on my Mac is something like this:

  • Write a post in content directory and commit to to Github repository.
  • Test the new post locally.
  • Push those changes to master branch on Github.
  • Netlify checks for any new changes and it triggers the build, post which the updated site is deployed on the domain.

Blogging Setup with Hugo, Github and Netlify

Simplifying it for iPad Pro #

If I had to simply the current workflow, I would chuck the testing of the new posts locally. As long as I am not making any significant change in my blog styles, I don’t need to test the sites locally. Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • Clone the Github repository using Working Copy
  • Write the post in an app that supports Markdown (Currently using iA Writer)
  • Copy the contents of the post with Hugo’s Frontmatter and create a file in content directory inside Working Copy app
  • Commit and push the changes

Since Netlify automatically monitors the changes to the repository, anytime a change is made it does the rest — building the site and deploying it on the domain.

Images #

Right now, this part of the setup is little haywire. I’m uploading images to Amazon S3 and getting a public link which I’m inserting in this post. Ideally, I would like to have:

  • Import images to iPad Pro
  • Edit (post-process, resize) images and upload
  • Get a public link to share

Hopefully in days to come, I should be able to smooth out this part of the workflow, but for now this is how my blogging setup looks like on iPad Pro.