Effortless blogging with Next.js, Dropbox and iA Writer
Tags: writing, blog, nextjs
Published: 2020-12-25 11:59:02

---
title: "Effortless blogging with Next.js, Dropbox and iA Writer"
published: true
description: How I run my blog to maximize writing pleasure.
tags: writing, blog, nextjs
canonical_url: https://francescodilorenzo.com/blog-setup
---

I took a stab at blogging and daily writing many times, but it never stuck with me. Part of it was not committing seriously enough, and part of it was the tooling.

When I made my last attempt, I used [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.com) for the blog, but publishing a new article involved too many steps—creating a new markdown file, committing it, and pushing it to a git repository. Way too much work and not practical enough from mobile, despite buying all the [cool apps](https://apps.apple.com/it/app/working-copy-git-client/id896694807?l=en) to enable that.

### Principles

With the [latest iteration](https://francescodilorenzo.com/) I am using a different approach.

It follows one core principle: writing and publishing articles should be fast and frictionless.

It's a hard requirement. Writing must be reduced to its essence and not feel like work. Otherwise, I just won't write. 

Besides all that, I want a minimal, practical design that reflects my personality and style. I mean design both visually and technologically.

I want it to be easy to extend this site with more content types, for this to gradually become my corner of the Internet.

[Brian's](https://brianlovin.com) and [Steph's](https://stephsmith.io) sites continue to be a massive inspiration in this regard.

### Implementation

So how did I structure things? Well, I started with the tool I wanted to use to write and made a bunch of choices around that. 

I want to write on my iPad Pro with [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer). It's the closest thing to a modern typewriter you can find, especially when paired with an external keyboard. I just freaking love it.

![](http://frankdilo.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/ia-writer.png)

The site is a [Next.js](https://nextjs.org) app, styled with [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com) and deployed to [Vercel](https://vercel.com/). This stack allowed me to respect all my principles outlined above with the nice benefit that it's free to host and that, being a static site, it can handle massive amounts of traffic without a sweat.

When I want to write a new post, I create a new markdown file in iA Writer and just write. When done, I move the finished article to a Dropbox folder with the iOS Files app and publish it by pressing a button (an iOS shortcut that calls a Vercel deploy hook that deploys the site).

I also set up a Zap that runs daily and triggers a deploy of the blog if I forget to do that.

In the NextJS app, I download that whole Dropbox folder with all the articles as a build step and use it to produce the site pages. 

It's fast. Deploy takes less than a minute, and I expect it will scale as I add more posts since I am downloading them in bulk, and these are just very lightweight text files. 

If I need to add an image to an article, I just upload it to my S3 bucket with [Dropshare](https://apps.apple.com/it/app/dropshare/id932316817?l=en) and include it in the post with markdown.

### Conclusion

I have never been happier with a setup. It gets out of the way and allows me to go from idea to writing to publication in very few steps. All of that on a dedicated writing device, which is the part I love the most.