Today I built a thing to allow me to get photos from my phone to this website without much manual intervention. I’ve dubbed it Timstagram.

Check out Timstagram

Why?

There are photos on my iPhone I don’t really want to upload to Instagram.

Part 1 - iOS Shortcut

I created an iOS Shortcut to take a photo from my camera roll, and send it through some wires and oceans finally reaching my website.

I hadn’t really explored Shortcuts too much since their release but I’m suitably impressed and already I’m thinking of all the things I can do with them going forward. The shortcut is too large to screenshot in its entirety, but it does a few things:

• ✅ Prompts me for a photo from my camera roll
• ✅ Does a bunch of transformations on it, eventually ending up as base64
• ✅ Asks me for a caption
• ✅ Beams that juicy info up to my remote function
• ✅ Shows a local success or failure notification

Not the whole configuration, but the good bits:

Part 2 - Netlify Function

At this point in time, this website is built with Hugo - meaning it’s basically a bunch of static HTML files. It’s also hosted on Netlify, meaning I’m able to take advantage of Netlify Functions.

I built an endpoint (a lambda if we’re being fancy) to process the information from the shortcut, and commit a blog post to my blog posts repo using GitHub’s API.

What this means is: each time I want to upload a photo to this website, I essentially have to make a code change and add the image as a blob to the repo, and re-deploy the website on Netlify for it to appear.

Check out the code for the function here

Part 3 - The Future?

I really like the idea of reclaiming ownership over my content, and I’m hoping to push forward with it and start using this website as a place to keep things as well as on the large centralised social networks. Perhaps I’ll start looking at integrating some IndieWeb stuff here at some point too.

👋