Making this easier

Blogging, how is this supposed to work? I’m not making a Medium account or setting up a Wordpress site. This is made with Jekyll and that’s fine but I want it to be as seamless as possible.

Constraints

I want the ability to write things on my phone and sync them to my PC, even though the majority of writing will probably be done on the PC. And for that reason I’ve set up Joplin on my phone and PC which auto-syncs and supports markdown.

The blog is hosted on Fastmail on my personal page, and so I don’t edit files directly on the web. Instead, I’m using WSL Ubuntu with Jekyll to create the site, and then copying it up to Fastmail. At least, that’s the plan.

Issues

There are a few problems I’ve encountered. Fastmail supports WebDAV, which I’m not super familiar with. I tried installed cadaver, which is a Linux WebDAV client, but it doesn’t support recursive uploading of files and directories, so no dice there. Next I tried webdavclient3, which is a Python3 client for WebDAV. It can upload directories and their contents - which is great - but it doesn’t seem to sync as such. Which would be fine because the site is small and I can just delete it and then upload a new version, right?

Well, no. Fastmail keeps your website in a folder, and it you completely delete the contents of that folder, it seems to forget it was hosting a page. Even if you don’t delete the parent folder, if you empty it’s contents you have to log back into the Fastmail admin panel and set it up again. That’s not difficult, but it’s not convenient either.

FTP

Fastmail also supports FTP, and googling tells me that lftp supports syncing. So, if that’s true and it works, then this page will be uploaded by FTP and appear on the site. If not, well…I’ll have to try something else tomorrow.