Mobile blogging

So recently I've been thinking about picking my blog back up again. There's a couple reasons for this, one being that I haven't touched this blog since 2024 and I don't like how empty it feels, and the other being that I'd like to get back into the habit of writing stuff and reducing social media usage and replacing it with a healthier avenue[1]. But one major block for me has been trying to find the time to set aside for writing blog posts.

Currently my website's set-up in a very spartan way, it's a static website hosted on github pages — cuz it's free and I don't want to pay for hosting or a domain rn — and mainly meant to be edited from my computer as a normal git repo. But therein lies the problem: I need to be on my computer in order to write a blogpost, and I can't do it anywhere else. Usually, that's not too much of a problem, I spend 90% of my time at my computer anyway, and usually the computer is where I'd want to be when I want to write a blogpost because that's where I can focus the most; I definitely won't be able to clear my thoughts properly in a noisy café for instance. But lately I've been studying for my A-levels exams, which means I'm usually busy with my studies throughout the day, and I end up doomscrolling on my phone at bed time or when I wake up [2], and usually I just end up wasting my time on reddit or something.

Instead of doing that, I'd like to be able to unwind and reflect on the day's thoughts, or maybe just write about things that interest me in general that I've been thinking about in general, but not having access to my blog on my phone makes that a little difficult. Or well, that's not really true. It's true that I don't have access to my blog on mobile yes, but I don't really need access, I can simply type out my blog post on my phone's note app or something and then transfer it over to my laptop when I wake up. A reasonable person would have done that, definitely. But to me, it felt a little odd, I didn't like the idea of having to manually transfer posts from my phone to the laptop, that sounds incredibly tedious. I'd ideally like to just type out my post and publish it there and then, and get on with my day ( or sleep, whatever ), I didn't want to have to deal with the chore of copying posts from one device to another.

So I started bouncing around ideas on how to fix this problem. One of the solutions I came up with was to simply make a tiny editor app that could locally pull my blog from it's repo, and give me an editor interface where I can edit the posts and publish them with the push of a button. That sounded appealing to me, but it's also slightly tedious, I don't have the time to be goofing off making apps, so that was a no-go.

The second option was to sign up for a third-party blogging site like bearblog, and just write there for a while and then transfer my posts over later, which was... workable, but it turns out that you need to pay in order to get your posts to show up on their discovery feed, and I didn't feel like shelling out money for blogging just yet ( even though bearblog does sound like a very good deal. I might get a subscription sometime in the future. I like the community feel it has ). I could still write on there, but then none of my posts would show up on the discover page nor on search engines and like, what's the point of writing blog posts that no one's going to see anyway? might as well just write in your notes app then, no need for an external account.

The final option I came up with, and the one I'm currently using to write this blog post, was to simply clone my blog's repo onto my phone via a linux terminal app called termux, and just use helix ( the text editor I use for all my editing needs on pc ) to edit my blog posts, and basically have the exact same workflow that I have on pc, but on my phone instead lol. So that's what i ended up going with :)

It's not a good workflow, it's pretty scuffed and i'd ideally want to get a custom mobile app or something built for this to make the editing process a bit more streamlined, but to be honest this is good enough for a first go. I'll try writing out some blog posts this way and see if I care enough to upgrade to a better system. I'm not even sure I'll really even continue this mobile blogging thing for very long either tbh, typing on mobile screens is an awful experience, and doing so while lying down is doubly uncomfortable ( and is starting to make my right arm hurt as i'm writing this for some reason ), so there's a chance I write a single blog post on mobile and then never do anything like this ever again. But, fwiw, I enjoyed coming up with this solution even if it ends up not panning out in the long run. It has a really scrappy feel to it that I really like :)