How I update this blog from my iPad

February 17, 2025

2025-11-15 update: I migrated this blog to Hugo and use Cloudflare for hosting, so this process is out of date. But I’ll leave it up for posterity.

I want to kickstart an extracurricular writing habit. I also want to write down the process I use to update this site from my iPad, so I can look it up after the writing habit has gone dormant and I need to remember how it all works. This post is a stone thrown at both birds.

Background

I use Jekyll to build this site and GitHub for source control. For hosting, I have a Digital Ocean droplet running Ubuntu and Nginx. I followed this guide to set it all up: How to Install Nginx on Ubuntu.

Process

To update the site from my iPad, I launch Safari and navigate to the repository with my source files on GitHub. From there, I hit . to start a codespace for my repository in a new tab. This codespace is a Visual Studio Code workspace loaded with the contents of my repository, all running in my browser.

I use this VS Code instance to make any changes I want to the source files. When I’m ready to build and preview the site, I open the integrated terminal for VS Code. I use bundle exec jekyll serve to update the contents of my _site directory and to check out a local preview that codepaces sets up via port forwarding. When everything checks out, I run an rsync command from the integrated terminal to send the contents of the _site directory to my server.

It’s a straightforward process, and the steps are pretty much the same when I update the site from VS Code on my laptop. Codespaces makes it possible to manage the whole process from start to finish from any device with a web browser.