A New Shortcut to Make Blogging on iPad a Little Easier

I created a new shortcut that is pretty simple, but removes a lot of the tedium from blogging on Gatsby from the iPad.

Previously, I had to create a file with a certain name format (honestly optional) in a directory (that was owned by Working Copy) and then add some metadata to the top of that file, and then I could start writing a blog post.

This new shortcut basically handles all of that for me. It prompts me for the post title, and then grabs the current date and counts the number of existing posts to generate an ID for the post. It then creates it and almost opens it in iA Writer.

This was pretty fun, I plan to keep my eyes open for other places where I can make my work a little easier with some automation (and honestly, make working on iPad a little more bearable as I try to do it more often). By the way, the shortcut makes heavy use of Scriptable so if you don’t have that already, you should absolutely get it. It allows you to use JavaScript in your shortcuts (and in other places in iOS)