Re-visioning my Workflow and Process; Maybe?

I am potentially looking at having to start a new workflow with my blogging. Not because I want to. For the past week or so I’ve been having issues using the Ulysses writing app and Squarespace iOS app. Specifically, I’ve had trouble copying text from Ulysses and pasting it into the Squarespace iOS app when I’m closer to being ready to publish. Up until now, Ulysses was the place where I drafted my posts. The customer service at Squarespace has been prompt as I have attempted to document with them the issues I am running in to. They’ve attempted to replicate my issues but have been unable to do so. This has been frustrating as I really enjoy writing in the Ulysses app; using the Squarespace interface for editing and publishing.

In a recent email, one of the customer service representatives encouraged me to, “try typing directly into the app rather than use this Ulysses writing app.” This rubbed me the wrong way. I get why he wanted me to try this but it just felt like I was being asked to compromise my writing workflow and process. That said, it doesn’t seem like I have a choice. I can either do what I’m doing right now, writing ‘directly into the app’ or continue to bang my head against the wall each time I try to copy/paste text from ‘this Ulysses app’ hoping it doesn’t fail again.

Another frustration comes from the fact that I had created some pretty cool Shortcuts, for my writing workflow and process, involving the Ulysses app. This issue with Ulysses and Squarespace has forced me to change that up a bit. I guess, if I attempt to put a positive spin on this, I can say that it’s all a part of the iterative nature of creating a workflow and process that gets things done. I created duplicate copies of these Shortcuts (keeping the originals as a reference) and replaced Ulysses with Squarespace. Doing so also involved deleting one Shortcut and taking another one out of my “Focus on Writing” Shortcut. I guess this is a good thing in that it streamlined the entire process by removing 2 things (the Shortcuts) from what I will now include in my ever evolving workflow and process.

So, where does this all leave me with Ulysses?

I could just use Ulysses to do other forms of writing like the Morning Pages practice I picked back up at the beginning of the summer. However, I really do not want to give up writing the drafts to my blog posts in the Ulysses app. My wife suggested that I reach out to the Ulysses team to see if they could help. I did write to them, explaining the issues I was having with their app and Squarespace. Then I did do some digging around on the Ulysses Help/Support site and found something I’d forgotten; Markdown is the preferred format I should be using when exporting text from Ulysses to Squarespace. I actually found a post I’d written last May asking about the same issue only while using the Mac version of the Ulysses app. Turns out the same thing needs to happen on iOS.

Some of you that have been following my journey with this new iOS and iPadOS beta know that I have since created Shortcuts involving split views with Ulysses, as a part of my workflow. Late yesterday afternoon I took the step of re-creating these Shortcuts, replacing Ulysses with the Squarespace iOS app due to, as I’ve already mentioned, the customer service people at Squarespace encouraging me to just write directly into their app.

After re-learning that Markdown is the preferred format for copy/pasting from Ulysses to Squarespace I went ahead and created a Shortcut that would, get text from a Ulysses Sheet, copy it to a clipboard, turn it to Markdown, copy that formatted text to a clipboard, and open up the Squarespace iOS app and Safari.

Shortcut I created to help with my workflow and process.

Creating a Shortcut like this allows me to continue with my process; pasting the text into a Squarespace blog entry, editing it, then adding tags and categories, finally saving it in the Squarespace iOS app before getting onto the web version, in Safari to write my excerpt and choosing an image from the image gallery (you cannot do that on the iOS app) then publishing from the web version.

I’m going to test out the new Shortcut I created that does all of this to see if it works. By work I mean I stop getting the error messages in the Squarespace iOS app. If I am successful...I will have to go back to a few Shortcuts and revise them so that they are in line with my “Focus on Writing” Shortcut.