Post short notes to a Jekyll blog using an iOS Shortcut

As I take steps to host all my content to my site first, I wanted to start adding notes and eventually push these to Twitter.

The Indieweb defines a note as:

A note is a post that is typically short unstructured plain text, written & posted quickly, that has its own permalink page. Creating, publishing, and owning your own notes is a key step towards reducing dependence on Twitter.

I recently created an iOS shortcut to post a photo to the photos section of my site. In the same vain this post outlines another iOS shortcut that I created to post a short note.

Note collection

As this site is currently built using Jekyll, I setup a new collection called notes that would be available at www.rdsaunders.co.uk/notes.

Each note is based on the time stamp that its is created to provide a unique URL that can eventually be posted to Twitter or shared elsewhere. Once the collection was setup and I had a listing to display all the notes I set about creating a note shortcut.

iOS Shortcut

This shortcut is a relatively simple one. The main effort was creating the file name from the current date/time stamp. The shortcut takes advantage of the GitHub API to submit the note directly to my repo on GitHub.

I’m using Netlify to build and host my site so once the note is committed, Netlify sees the changes in my repository then builds and deploys the changes.

You can download a copy of the iOS Shortcut for yourself. When installing the shortcut you’ll need to configure it with your own GitHub credentials.

Prerequisites

• GitHub username – used to authenticate to the GitHub API
• GitHub repository name – the repository you are uploading to.
• GitHub personal access token – this must have read/write access to the appropriate repository. View the Github docs to find out how to create a access token.
• GitHub committer name and email address – used when committing files to the repository.
• Note upload path – where the markdown file should be created e.g. _notes.

What the shortcut does

1. The shortcut asks you: What do you want to say? This text is used as the note.
2. Uses the current date and time to generate a unique filename e.g 201912302911.md.
3. BASE 64 encodes the text to send to GitHub.
4. Creates and uploads a markdown file containing the date, and the notes text via the GitHub API.

Yaml front matter structure

A table explaining how the front matter is populated

Front matter field	Data population
date	Uses the creation date of the note.
content	The note text is used in the primary content area of the markdown file.

Notes / quirks

• The shortcut relies on access to https://shrtcts.app/ to use some of the date / string utilities.