Lots and lots to do still…
May 2025
Join the Postalgic Beta
Postalgic beta is up! Join the beta over here.
I submitted Postalgic to TestFlight App Review today so I can put it into beta officially. Pretty cool!
Claude Code wrote this app description for me.
Postalgic - Pocket-Sized Blogging
Transform your iPhone into a complete blogging platform with Postalgic, the all-in-one decentralized micro-blogging app. Create, customize, and publish beautiful static websites directly from your device.
Key Features:
• Write with Ease - Create posts using Markdown with rich embed support for YouTube videos, images, and link previews
• Complete Customization - Design custom themes, manage colors, and organize content with categories and tags
• Flexible Publishing - Deploy automatically to GitHub Pages, AWS S3, SFTP servers, or any Git repository
• Full Blog Management - Handle everything from post creation to sidebar customization and static file management
• Mobile-First Design - Native iOS experience optimized for creating content on the go
Perfect for: \
- Personal bloggers seeking independence from social platforms \
- Developers wanting GitHub Pages integration \
- Writers who prefer mobile content creation \
- Anyone building a decentralized web presence \ \ Postalgic generates completely static websites, ensuring fast loading times and maximum compatibility. Your content remains yours - no vendor lock-in, no subscription fees, just pure blogging freedom in your pocket. \ \ Ready to reclaim your corner of the web? Start blogging the decentralized way with Postalgic.
We’ve got favicons and share preview image support now! Wowza! However the favicons don’t appear in Safari now, not sure what voodoo I need to do there… code is the same as Wordpress I think, so…
We’re getting close to the first beta! And technically 1.0 at that point. We’re almost there, just one or two more features to figure out how to work in.
Implemented keychain items to store sensitive passwords, took some finessing Claude Code to get it to stop messing the implementation up. Always a struggle…
Milestone Get!
So the main reason I finally started building this app after two years of sitting on the idea is that I got really big mad at the Wordpress.com hosting I was using to run https://staires.org.
For the past several months Wordpress had a bug which would delete entire paragraphs of text as you were writing. The official explanation was that a Shift+Backspace shortcut was slipped into Gutenberg, their writer interface, and that people (like me) end up accidentally hitting Shift+Backspace all the time. I don’t know if I believe this because I have no real idea how I would be hitting that shortcut on accident.
Either way, needless to say, other people were very upset about this as well. I felt like I got the brush off when I reported it, so I reported it again. And I went so far as to email Matt Mullenwag directly because it frustrated me so much (no response).
Allegedly they’ve fixed it now, though no one has reported in the support thread that it’s been fixed. And I wouldn’t know, as I’ve been building Postalgic, and as of today staires.org is now a Postalgic blog. Cool!
I won’t be turning my back entirely on Wordpress, as I’ve never had any real issues with my self-hosted instance over at https://amiantos.net, though it would be cool if Postalgic could be powerful enough to host my “full blog” and not smaller focused setups like staires.
Cleaned up the post editor view. I think it looks quite nice now!
Postalgic.app has a new design courtesy of Claude Code and a little elbow grease from yours truly. Looks really nice, I think! Here’s a glimpse of Claude Code’s first draft and then the final version (as of today anyway).
Yesterday I added the ability to customize the accent color for your published site, which is why the accent color of this devlog is now green (unless I’ve changed it since writing this). Cool!
Image posts!
You can post images now, one or many.
I’m definitely in the messy middle of this project now. All that remains really is dogfooding and improving the UX & architecture of the app. Also SwiftUI is still so fucking janky.
I implemented a new editor today that has little shortcut buttons for doing bold, italic, block quote, and links.
Block quote…
It was actually a huge pain in the ass because this project is now kinda too complex to expect Claude Code to really understand it and add very big features. I also don’t think Claude Code really understands … well why did this view break right now? Goddamnit… argh….
There we go. I fixed it. I hope. We’ll see.
I can’t post images with Postalgic yet so I can’t show you the cool new dashboard design… but it’s cool. I promise.
We got clean URLs now, with proper stubs for tags, categories, and posts. They’re auto-generated and currently not modifiable by the user, not sure if I will keep it that way or not. Also need to make sure renames update it…