When learning something new, I get fixated. Hours pass like seconds, and five hours of sleep (or less) a night becomes common.
My current focus is streamlining my life with the award-winning Drafts app. Close behind is the idea of Learning in Public. I’m constantly trying to figure things out. Often, I can’t find a specific solution to the problem I’m experiencing.
Enter problem number one. I wanted to post a random thought about a quote I’d been toying with using Drafts to post to Pika on my iPhone. I’d spent some time between meetings drafting and editing my little thought in preparation for posting. I went to the Drafts Directory to search for a Pika add-on. Nope, none there.
Solution attempt one. So I Googled. Nope, can’t be done directly. I did find ONE blog post. Something about Apple Shortcuts not working, but writing a script with Claude did something good. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out what he was doing.
What to do. What to do. I noticed a “You can find me on Mastodon” link and hit the dude up. He was great and pointed me in the right direction. Thank you, Austin!
I wrote the script with a lot of heavy lifting from Perplexity.
iOS Script
// Get full content\nlet content = draft.content.trim();\nlet lines = content.split("\n");
// First line = headline, rest = body\nlet headline = (lines.length > 0) ? lines[0].trim() : "";\nlet body = (lines.length > 1) ? lines.slice(1).join("\n").trim() : "";
// Basic validation\nif (!headline) {\n let p = Prompt.create();\n p.title = "Missing headline";\n p.message = "The first line of this draft should be your Pika post title.";\n p.addButton("OK");\n p.show();\n context.cancel("No headline");\n} else {\n app.setClipboard(headline);\n app.openURL(PIKA_NEW_POST_URL);\n}\n```
It worked! The first line is your title. The body is the paragraphs below. Hit the "Post to Pika" (or whatever you named your action), and the title is magically in your clipboard, and you are taken to your posting dashboard in your browser. Paste. Swipe up and to the right to go back to Drafts, then tap the wonderful little button that says "Copy Body," and magically you'll be shot back into Pika so you can paste the text into the body and hit publish.
Done. That's as good as it gets on iOS.
**Enter problem number two.** This works all well and good on your Mac, too. BUT, I figured there was a better way. Something faster. Enter a little app called [Paste](https://pasteapp.io). Their [Paste Stack](https://pasteapp.io/help/using-paste-stack) seemed to be exactly what I wanted. Grab two items and paste those somewhere else in sequential order.
Long story short. Fiddly and needed too many hot keys to pull off. One to open the clipboard and another to paste what was copied.
If you'd like to use Paste, maybe you have the muscle memory with that app already, the script is the same as the one below. The only difference is you'll use Paste key combos.
**Solution number two.** I remembered that [Raycast](https://www.raycast.com) can do just about any dang thing. Sure enough, you can do sequential pastes. Now, all I have to do is run my action. I hit (my custom programmed key combo) shift+command+V once in the title field and once in the body. Hit post, and you're done!