I’m going to set myself a goal for this month: to actually finish something. Whether it’s a song, or a website or a story... I’m going to work on something until I consider it complete.

And then, perhaps, I’ll actually publish that piece.

It’s 7:53am on a Saturday morning. I’ve been up since 5:16. Woke up to the sound of the cat barfing. Which seems like an apt simile for 2020.

On March 12th, which was a Thursday, I arrived at work and started my morning routine; put my lunch in the fridge, poured some coffee out of my thermos, setup the laptop, and launched the necessary programs I typically use during the day. Opening my inbox, I saw an email from HR stating the growing concerns about COVID-19. They asked that everyone work from home until the following Friday. I remember thinking “sweet... work from home for a whole week!”

What a naive thought that was.

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.