Today I automated a blog using email (to get off social media)

It's the end of 2022. I have COVID, and so have some spare time. I spent most of the first day just scrolling, which sucks. I'm going to try to stop that for 2023, especially with the whole Twitter situation.

I've tried before, but this time I'm setting myself up to actually stay off.

I created a blog (this one!). I used Ghost because I didn't want to spend a ton of time researching alternatives or hosting something myself, and Ghost is easy. I connected Zapier so that I can email in posts, and in turn it auto-posts to my Twitter and Mastodon accounts, which I'll be logging out of as soon as I've confirmed all of these automations are working.

It's very 'dumb' automation, and currently doesn't even support images, which I'll have to figure out at some point, but here's what I set up:

- Sending an email to ghostpost@magiczapieremail.com posts on the blog

- Sending an email to ghostdraft@magiczapieremail.com creates a draft post that I can go edit on a 'real computer' later (in case I want to do something fancy)

- Any new blog posts get sent to Twitter and Mastodon

- Any mentions on Twitter get sent to me via SMS (I expect I'll turn this one off after a few weeks)

Let's see if I stick with it!