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.

I'm not having as much luck as I'd hope getting an iPad-only solution to posting entries here. I can't get my Dropbox to sync after following Tyler Hall's entry. I know it's possible...but maybe not possible with my host, which is currently a VPS on Dreamhost. I'm sure it is... I've just not been smart enough to figure it out as of yet.

Another option which I think I'll explore is utilizing Github Pages, and point the i-am.ski domain there. Assuming I can get it working (Github Pages has built-in support for Jekyll right out of the box), there will be the added benefit of becoming more comfortable with Git. I use Git daily at work, and while I'm not near as gun-shy as I used to be, if anything goes awry and I need to use some other git commands, then I tend to get a bit nervous. Particularly when I end up having merge conflicts, or similar issues.

Otherwise, isolation goes on. Given the time I've been spending in my basement where my home office is, I've been wondering how hard it'd be to add another window. Probably more money than I want to spend on this house.