I have an odd fascination with how people get the job done. In that I mean, what their tools look like, what their process is, even their work spaces.

One of the feeds I look forward to reading the most is from Uses This. Their typical interviewee is usually in the tech sector, but there have been several artists, writers, and performers. I’m drawn to their tools of choice, be it Windows, or Mac. The peripherals they use, and the hardware and software they can’t live without. Some list cameras, and even games they play.

Uses This recently featured Kris Howard, and she offered up a lengthy interview. Which I loved of course. In the Who are you, and what do you do? section, I learned in one quick paragraph that she’s working for Amazon in Germany (which she and her partner relocated to in August 2020 from Sydney Australia), that she’s a huge Roald Dahl fan, and that she’s an award-winning knitter. She’s also been blogging for 20+ years at https://www.web-goddess.org. So, naturally, I went down that path and discovered she’s posed naked (along with 5000 other people) for Spencer Tunick. Some people really put it all out there.

But back to the tools. For me, it’s a captivating look into what is typically a non-conversation piece. At work, there’ll be tools that are suggested, and workflows to follow... but that’s about as far as the conversation goes. Someone will ask what my hobbies are, and I’ll say music. But I don’t typically say “Oh, I love playing around in Logic Pro X or sometimes Bitwig, while other times I’ll grab my PRS SE 24 and plug it into my Fender Mustang amp and then play along to some Blues backing tracks on YouTube. It’s not a typical every day conversational topic.

By the way, there are some really smart and hella-creative people out there. Call it a side benefit to being glued to the Uses This feed. I’ve learned about various conferences, and podcasts, and hobby projects (one person is a member of of the WesterosCraft project team that is slowly recreating the entire world of Game of Thrones in Minecraft) that I didn’t even have a clue existed.

Heck, one gal is even into group hugging. I mean, how cool is that?

The last several posts have all referenced my struggles to get i-am.ski up and running in a manner that I was striving for; namely, to be able to update this site using just my iPad Pro in the simplest manner possible. If I had built i-am.ski with Wordpress or CraftCMS, or one of a half-dozen other available CMS frameworks, it would have been a simple matter of loading up a web browser and pointing it to the admin backend and posting from there.

But I went and got all pigheaded about this.

After ignoring the site (once again) for awhile, I took another stab at getting my personal domain hooked up with the Custom Domain feature that’s available in Github Pages. I think I finally, finally cracked it, and now I’m publishing posts from my iPad, to Github Pages, using Jekyll as my CMS, Working Copy for version control, and iA Writer to actually write the posts. Huzzah!

The key, missing bit in having people who visit i-am.ski was setting the A records for my domain on my hosting provider. I’d set the CNAME record as described in the Github Pages docs, but I had completely missed the step where it described how to setup the ALIAS, ANAME, or A record. I thankfully found a medium.com article that outlined the 2 key steps needed. Once I read through that, everything clicked into place.

Now I have no excuse to write more often. Everything is working smoothly.

It's finally starting to come back together. Somehow I managed to wrap my brain around the whole update-the-site-from-the-iPad concept, and I seem to be back to posting to this blog like normal. Well, almost normal. There's still a few minor issues to iron out as I see it:

• Transfer the host name i-am.ski to Github Pages
• Fix the templates so I'm as close to the original Ghost theme I had going (there was a ton of CSS I wasn't using, started with a different base theme this time)
• Work on integrating iA Writer (strictly for aesthetic purposes.)
• Categories! Need to create or import the current category template pages.

And I'm sure there's more to do that I'll think of down the road.

But holy hell, I'm finally updating my site from the iPad. That's pretty amazing in my book. This little iPad Pro 11" is a pretty amazing little machine, and being able to utilize even more of its awesomeness it just...well, awesome.

Once again, testing to see if I can figure out an ipad solution. I think I have several "testing" posts now floating around in the ether. Not sure where they disappeared to.

Oh well. Take 424235!

edit

Whoa. Holy crap, did I actually get this working? Did I find a solution that actually works?

If I smoked, I'd go have a cigarette. This has been a long process in getting this all setup. I'd rather have used iA Writer, and that's strictly because it's just a more elegant program for writing, but honestly, right now, Textastic is bombastic.

I'll worry about iA Writer later. For now, let's get comfortable with Textastic and Working Copy.