Update your website on the go with Shortcuts for iOS

Since the release of iOS 12, I’ve gone all-in on Shortcuts. I was never a big Workflow user (the company Apple aquired and turned into Shortcuts), but the addition of system-level actions, as well as the public commitment from Apple that Shortcuts is here to stay, convinced me to spend some time playing around with the app. I managed to get on the pre-release beta for Shortcuts, and I’ve been using it daily ever since. At the time of writing I’ve got 85 (yes, I used a Shortcut to calculate that number) Shortcuts in frequent use, ranging from incredibly simple to pretty complex. In this post, I’d like to take a look at one of my favouites.

🤔 Motivation

Recently, I felt the urge to redesign my website. I’ll save the details for another day, but suffice to say I ended up creating my own static site generator, one of the key design goals of which was that the site content should be easy to update on the go. For this reason I decided to write the content in markdown, then have the generator compile it into HTML. This would enable me to use any markdown editor I like to update my site’s content (bonus points if it has git integration).

Most of the code for the generator was written whilst on holiday in southern Italy.

After a bit of work, I had the generator in a usable state. I could open up Working Copy on my iPhone, clone the website’s repo, and write/edit content on the go…