User guide — all chapters
More than one site
Every site in Selfish is fully independent: its own posts, pages, categories, tags, theme, images and place to publish. A personal blog, a project log, a photo journal and a client’s site can sit in one list without touching each other.
On iPhone and iPad your sites are a list. On the Mac the site switcher at the head of the posts column lists them, each with its domain and whether it has changes that aren’t live, and ⌘1 to ⌘9 switch between them.
Archive a site
A site you aren’t working on can be archived. It moves to an Archived section at the bottom of your sites (on the Mac, a submenu of the switcher), out of the way. It still opens, syncs and publishes. On iPhone and iPad, touch and hold the site and choose Archive Site. On any device, use the Archived switch under Site Settings → Site → Your Data.
Duplicate a site
Site Settings → Site → Your Data → Duplicate Site makes a second site with the same posts, pages, photos and settings. Use it to try a new look, or to start a sister site.
The copy has nowhere to publish until you choose, so it can’t overwrite the original.
Delete a site, and get it back
Deleting a site moves it to Recently Deleted for 30 days, with every post, photo, setting and password. Restore it from the bottom of the site list (on the Mac, Recently Deleted Sites… in the switcher), or delete it for good there.
Deleting a site never touches what is already on your server. Your published site keeps running. That is the ownership test, and Selfish is built to pass it.
iCloud sync
If you are signed in to iCloud, your sites sync across your own devices. Start a post on the train, finish it at the desk. It runs through your iCloud account. There is no Selfish server, so there is no Selfish copy of your writing.
- Sync needs iCloud Drive turned on and enough space in your account. Without iCloud, Selfish keeps working on the device, and picks sync back up when it returns.
- Photos, video and audio sync with their posts. On a second device a file may arrive at the moment you first open, or publish, the post that uses it.
- Posts in Recently Deleted sync too, so a post deleted on one device can be restored on another.
The app’s iCloud button shows the state of your account and the latest sync activity, if you ever need to check.
Publishing from more than one device
Publishing passwords, keys and tokens sync between your own devices through iCloud Keychain, so a site set up on your iPhone can be published from your Mac without typing anything again. iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted: the credentials can be read on your devices, and not by Apple or by us. Where iCloud Keychain is off or unavailable, credentials stay on the device they were entered on.
On SFTP, WebDAV, S3 and folders, where Selfish keeps its record beside the site, the publish screen compares with what is really live, and says so if your live site has posts this device hasn’t synced yet, or newer versions of them. On Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages it can only compare with this device’s own last publish, and a deploy replaces the whole site, so let iCloud catch up before publishing from a second device. See Preview and publish.
What stays on one device
A few things are deliberately not synced.
| Stays on the device | Why |
|---|---|
| The folder a site publishes to, and the folder of a Markdown copy | Access to a folder can only be granted on the device that has it. Choose the folder on each device. |
| Earlier versions of a post | Kept where you wrote them. |
| Publish history | This device’s publishes of a site. |
Storage
Site Settings → Site → Your Data → Storage… shows what a site takes on this device: its photos, videos and audio by kind, what Recently Deleted is holding, the largest files and the posts they belong to, and the size of Selfish’s whole library.
Files that no post uses can be removed there. They are left by a post deleted on another device, or by an import that didn’t finish, and removing them changes nothing on your site.
Posts in Recently Deleted keep their media for the 30 days. Delete them there to free the space sooner.