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In the previous post, I discussed my blogging setup and how it has evolved. I mentioned I moved to Bear 2.0 and tried to use it to manage my blog drafts and ideas. I am enjoying this application, but I wanted to be able to post from it as well. I worked with Jarrod Blundy from HeyDingus, who put together this fantastic shortcut for me.
It allows you to select Bear notes tagged with “” and then converts them into Markdown files ready to be published on Blot.
This was part of the simple hierarchy (Ideas, Drafts and Published) I mentioned in the last post. The shortcut looks into all notes with this tag and displays them as a list to pick the one you want to preview. You then see the post and any images that might be in it. This is where I had an issue that Jarrod was able to solve. When you add an image to Blots media or images folder in Dropbox, the link is converted and has to get back into the post.
It does this by converting and resizing any images within the Bear note, setting each image’s file name and description, uploading the images to Dropbox, and then reformatting the text to reference those newly saved images. Then it formats the rest of the text to be Blot-compatible and saves it all as a Markdown file.
Now you have a file formatted with all the necessary information in it.
Then, it presents a menu to publish the post or save it as a draft. If a draft is saved, it will be opened as a live preview. Published posts are live on your homepage, which will be opened to confirm that everything is published correctly.
This is a very cool feature of Blot that Jarrod worked on. When you post a draft to the drafts folder, Blot automatically generates the HTML preview file and opens it in Safari to open it up so you get a visual review of how the post will look when you repeat the process to the live site.
Finally, the original Bear notes are retagged as “” so the Bear files move in my little folder structure.
Once I am happy with the draft, I rerun the shortcut and move it to Live on the server. I wrote a very simple clean-up shortcut as well. When you move the file Ito the Blot drafts folder a preview file is created and remains there. I created a shortcut to pull the all the .md files from the folder and present them as a list. I select the one I want and hit delete. When the file is gone, the preview file also disappears automatically. This is not necessary, but it keeps the hygiene of the folder clean for me.
I can run this shortcut from any device, allowing me to post anytime or anywhere. Please go check out Jarrods other shortcuts on his website and support him,
