app

QuickPost

A tiny native macOS menu bar app for posting notes and replies to this site without touching a terminal.

This site publishes by pushing markdown to main — Cloudflare Workers Builds deploys it, and a GitHub Action syndicates to Bluesky/the fediverse via Bridgy. That means "an app that posts to my site" needs no server, no Micropub endpoint, and no auth beyond the git credentials already on the machine. QuickPost is the whole idea taken literally: a compose box that writes a markdown file into the repo, commits it, and pushes.

What it does

Click the menu bar icon (a square-and-pencil) to get a small compose popover:

• Note | Reply toggle. Notes get an optional slug (timestamped filename otherwise); replies get an in-reply-to URL field.
• Clipboard assist: if the clipboard holds a bsky.app post URL when the popover opens, it switches to Reply and prefills the URL — the intended flow is "see a post while skimming Bluesky, copy its link, reply from your own site."
• ⌘↩ to post. On post it writes the file with the same frontmatter the npm run note scaffolder produces (explicit local-offset date:, Bridgy syndication links), then:
  1. Refuses to do anything unless the repo is on main — see below
  2. git add — only the new file
  3. git commit -m "Note: <slug>"
  4. git pull --rebase --autostash origin main — the syndication workflow commits captured URLs back to main with [skip ci], so the local clone is routinely behind; autostash tolerates an otherwise-dirty tree
  5. git push origin HEAD:main
  6. Verifies origin/main actually moved to the new commit
• Errors show inline with the draft intact; drafts survive clicking away.

From there the normal pipeline takes over: Workers Builds deploys, the syndicate Action waits for the deploy, pings Bridgy, and commits the resulting Bluesky/fediverse URLs back into the post's frontmatter. Post-to-live is about a minute.

Building

Swift 5.9+ with macOS Command Line Tools is enough — no Xcode required (the CLT SDK includes SwiftUI). Requires macOS 14+.

./build.sh          # swift build -c release + assemble build/QuickPost.app
open build/QuickPost.app

The bundle is ad-hoc signed and unsandboxed (it needs plain file + git access to the repo working copy).

To keep it handy, symlink it into /Applications and add it to System Settings → Login Items:

ln -s "$PWD/build/QuickPost.app" /Applications/QuickPost.app

A symlink (rather than a copy) means a rebuild is picked up automatically.

Configuration

Settings live in defaults under me.michaelbishop.quickpost:

# repo working copy (default: /Users/miklb/Sites/michaelbishop)
defaults write me.michaelbishop.quickpost repoPath -string /path/to/clone

# commit but don't push — useful for testing
defaults write me.michaelbishop.quickpost skipPush -bool YES

QUICKPOST_REPO and QUICKPOST_SKIP_PUSH environment variables override those; PostService.swift is Foundation-only on purpose so it can be compiled standalone with swiftc next to a scratch main.swift for smoke-testing the templates and git flow without the GUI.

Troubleshooting

• Push fails with Permission denied (publickey) — GUI apps get the SSH agent from launchd, which occasionally lacks the key. Run ssh-add --apple-use-keychain (or set UseKeychain yes / AddKeysToAgent yes in ~/.ssh/config). The post stays committed locally; pushing from a terminal also recovers it.

• Rebase failure — the app aborts the rebase and reports it; the post is committed locally, resolve in a terminal and push.

• "Repo is on branch 'x', not main" — publishing is main-only. The commit would go to whichever branch is checked out while the push sends main, so on a feature branch the post lands nowhere and git still exits 0. The app now checks first and writes nothing. git checkout main in the repo and post again.

  This is the bug that produced a green success with nothing published (2026-10-05): a note committed onto a checked-out feature branch, then git push origin main pushed the local main ref, which had no new commits, so git reported "Everything up-to-date" and exited 0. Hence both the branch guard and the post-push check that origin/main really moved — a push with nothing to send also exits 0, so the exit code alone cannot tell "published" from "did nothing".

Adapting it

The site-specific parts are all in Sources/QuickPost/PostService.swift: the default repo path, the frontmatter templates (which match this site's scripts/new-note.js and its Bridgy conventions), and the branch name. If your site also publishes by pushing markdown, that file is the only thing to change.