From iPhone to Live Website in Under 5 Minutes

I write everything on my iPhone. Notes app, voice memos, quick drafts on the train. The problem used to be getting those drafts from my phone to a live blog post. The process was: copy text, open laptop, paste into CMS, format, add metadata, upload images, hit publish. Minimum 20 minutes of busywork.

Now it takes under 5 minutes and I never open a laptop. Here's the exact pipeline.

The Stack

Apple Notes (writing) → Apple Shortcuts (trigger) → Make.com (orchestration) → Sanity CMS (content management) → Vercel (hosting) → Live site. That's it. No custom servers, no complex infrastructure. Just managed services connected by automation.

How It Works

Step 1: I write in Apple Notes. Just plain text with basic formatting. When a draft is ready, I share it to a custom Shortcut I built called "Publish Draft."

Step 2: The Shortcut extracts the title (first line), body (everything else), and asks me to pick a category from a preset list. It packages this as JSON and sends it to a Make.com webhook.

Step 3: Make.com receives the payload and calls my /api/ingest-post endpoint. This creates a draft in Sanity with the title, body, category, auto-generated slug, and calculated read time.

Step 4: I open Sanity Studio on my phone, review the draft, make any final edits, and hit Publish. Sanity fires a webhook to /api/revalidate, which tells Vercel to rebuild the affected pages.

Step 5: Within 60 seconds of hitting Publish, the post is live on deranweke.com with full SEO metadata, reading time, and category tagging. Total elapsed time: about 4 minutes.

Why This Matters

The friction between having an idea and publishing it is the #1 reason most people don't blog consistently. Every step of friction — opening a laptop, formatting in a CMS, uploading images — is a chance to get distracted or decide "I'll do it later." This pipeline eliminates all of that friction.

I've published more in the last 3 months using this system than I did in the previous 2 years. The best productivity system isn't the one with the most features. It's the one with the least friction.