Updates about Postalgic development
I added basic support for Simple Analytics, so you can now turn on Simple Analytics for a blog, which auto-injects their script tag into the default template (there are template tags for it now), and also shows you the past month of traffic on the dashboard, screenshot below.
Heck yeah, I had Claude Code set up a docker image and it works great. You can now run Postalgic self-hosted at home very easily by doing this...
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/amiantos/postalgic/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d
And then you can load the site at http://localhost:8010/ and... it just works! Assuming you have docker installed already, of course.
Heck yes, I just finally got a full sync system with smart publishing included working. So you can make a post on self-hosted, publish, pull it down to iOS, make a post and publish it, pull it down on self-hosted, and so on. It's working! It took some thought but, goddamn, it's finally working properly.
Unsurprisingly it has been very difficult to get syncing to work. Only today did I finally get syncing working between two copies of the self-hosted version of the app. Now we'll figure out if I can get syncing working between iOS -> iOS and then iOS -> self-hosted. I already know self-hosted -> iOS works. There's also two separate systems at play, because we're trying to do smart publishing so both systems need to generate the same identical html and hash it the same way, this has been annoying...
I am working today on getting cross-platform syncing working for Postalgic blogs. So when you upload your blog, it uploads a syncable version as well, with your draft posts encrypted with a choosable password. Then you can have your blog in multiple clients and the 'cloud storage' of your blog is just your site storage. So far I've gotten it working for uploading the sync data and importing a blog from the sync data in the new self-hosted version. Just need to QA the iOS side of that and keep going...
For some reason yesterday I started having Claude Code build out a self-hosted web version of Postalgic. It's already fully functional, just... ugly. I also built in an export feature for the iOS version, so you can fully export your site from iOS and then import it into the self-hosted version. This isn't ideal–the most ideal solution would be to have a sync system where the uploaded site is the cloud backup of it. Maybe you do an export->import to get it started and then some system maintains it otherwise.
Anyway, it's neat. I had the smallest feeling I would blog more if I had a desktop version of it, and I was able to get it working in less than 4 hours.
Postalgic for iOS v1.0 is now live on the App Store. How cool!
I guess that went pretty quick after all! I just submitted Postalgic to App Review to get it up on the App Store. This project moved pretty quick, my first commit was April 19th. So about 42 days between when work began and work really ended. I didn’t work on the app every single one of those days either, so all told I probably built the app out in about two weeks? Three weeks? Thank you Claude Code.
Once 1.0 is out I can start working on the remote services meant to be coupled to the app, the “portal” idea as well as “pro” static site hosting… but I should put some more love into my other apps before getting started on that stuff. We need to polish PiBar 1.2 up and also get 1.2 versions out for Aislingeach and Inneal. Anyhoo, that’s not Postalgic related.
I’ll post the App Store url for Postalgic later on when it’s approved.
Lots and lots to do still…
Postalgic beta is up! Join the beta over here.
