With a cat snoozing on my lap and less than 10 minutes before I’m supposed to start watching a new-to-me episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the thought occurred to me: how quickly could I make a blog post happen?
Long ago I set up Working Copy on my iPhone. It’s an app that helps you handle a Git repository. If I recall correctly, I set it up as an extra “safety net” for giving presentations using Reveal; I wanted to make sure I had a way to fix typos or other last-minute edits.
Now I’m instead trying to see whether this app could be repurposed as an POSSE-mindset alternative to Mastodon or other microblogging platforms.
It’s been 10 minutes! Let’s commit this!
Here’s a Mastodon post I made minutes after publishing the above:
With more practice, I’m certain I could make this go more quickly. These 10 minutes included trying to figure out what I’d write about, plus re-familiarizing myself with how Working Copy actually works.
I spent a few minutes looking in Textastic, a text editor app. Instead, it was easiest to:
Then I had to wait about 3 to 5 minutes for GitHub to process that commit and turn it into a published page.
It might sound closer to a Rube Goldberg machine than fully automated queer space blogging, but it’s a workable solution for a mostly-POSSE approach to blogging.
And I still have the cat snoozing on my lap!
Overall, this seems like a pretty useful alternative to posting longer thoughts on Mastodon or other social media.
There’s probably an extra 5-ish minutes of work involved.
This 5 minutes of labor (not 5 “real-time” minutes) includes:
So this is clearly somewhat more involved than just posting a routine idea or thread on Mastodon. But it’s a workable alternative!
Some thoughts (or other purposes) might well be worth that 5-ish minutes of labor. (And yes, for those following closely: even after that episode and all these edits, the cat is still snoozing away on my lap.)