Posting to My Site From My Phone With an Apple Shortcut

My log is a little Twitter clone. Short thoughts, timestamps, a location pin — the stuff I miss about old Twitter. The problem: every "tweet" was really me opening a laptop, hand-editing two files, keeping the HTML and the RSS feed in sync, and pushing to GitHub.

That's a lot of friction for a one-line thought. So thoughts stopped getting posted.

I wanted to post from my phone, the way you'd actually use Twitter. Here's what I landed on.

The Idea

The whole thing is three pieces:

1. An Apple Shortcut on my phone — I tap it, it grabs my location and the time, and asks for the text.
2. A GitHub Action that takes that text and runs a script.
3. A Python script in the repo that formats the post into both the log page and the RSS feed, commits, and lets GitHub Pages redeploy.

The key decision: the phone only sends plain text. All the formatting logic lives in the repo, where I can actually test and fix it. The phone has the easy job.

The Script

The script does the boring, error-prone part — turning a sentence into a properly formatted entry in two places and keeping them in sync. It takes three arguments:

python3 scripts/add_log.py \
  --text "Back in Malta. Posting this from my phone." \
  --location "Msida, Malta" \
  --datetime "2026-06-18T00:16:00+02:00"

It escapes the HTML, builds the RSS <item>, and even auto-numbers the entry id when I post more than once in a day. I never touch the markup.

The GitHub Action

A workflow_dispatch workflow runs the script and commits the result:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      text:
        required: true
      location:
        default: "Winston-Salem, NC"
      datetime:
        default: ""

One thing worth doing here: pass the inputs into the script through environment variables, not by dropping them straight into the shell command. Otherwise a stray quote — or a <script> tag in a post — can break the run (or worse).

The Shortcut

This is the part that talks to GitHub. The Shortcut:

• Gets the current location and pulls out City and Region
• Formats the current date as ISO 8601 (with the time zone)
• Asks me for the post text
• Sends it all to GitHub's API with Get Contents of URL:

POST https://api.github.com/repos/<user>/<repo>/actions/workflows/add-log.yml/dispatches

With an Authorization: Bearer <token> header and a JSON body pointing at the branch and the inputs. A fine-grained token scoped to just this one repo, with Actions: read and write, is all it needs.

Tap, type, done. The post is live a minute later.

The Headaches (So You Can Skip Them)

I won't pretend this was smooth. The script and the Action were quick. The Shortcut was the pain. Three things got me:

1. There's no "Country" field. Apple's Get Details of Location gives you City and State, but no Country. The one you want is Region — at the country level it returns the country name (it gave me "Malta").

2. JSON quotes. In the Shortcut's request-body builder, you type keys and values without quotation marks — it adds them for you. Type "ref" with the quotes and GitHub bounces it with a 422 "not permitted keys" error.

3. ISO 8601, for real. My first working dispatch failed because the Shortcut sent Jun 18, 2026 at 12:12 AM instead of 2026-06-18T00:12:00+02:00. The script wants a real ISO timestamp with a time zone offset — otherwise it can't know I'm six time zones from home. Make sure the date is actually formatted, and that the formatted value is the one going into the request, not the raw date.

The Result

Was the Shortcut a pain to set up? Yes. But it's a one-time pain, and now posting a thought is genuinely as easy as it should've been all along.

This very site is static — no database, no server, no CMS. Turns out you don't need one to post from your phone. You just need a shortcut and a little glue.