The hard part was never the writing
Why a calligrapher built a video check-in tool.
I've been writing calligraphy for twenty years.
Every day I write, I film it, and I post it — to Douyin (China's TikTok), to Xiaohongshu (China's Instagram), to Bilibili, to YouTube, to places whose names keep changing. Filming takes an hour. Editing takes an hour. And then there's the part nobody warns you about: keeping track of what went where.
Douyin — posted. Xiaohongshu — did I post this one, or was that yesterday's? Bilibili — the draft is still sitting there, isn't it?
Not the uploading itself — that's just clicking. The bottleneck is memory. Did I already post this? Which video is still waiting? When I look back at a whole month of daily work, is there anything that shows I was consistent? Without a record, a month of effort dissolves into fog.
So I built a small tool
Not for a market I researched. For myself. It scans my video folder, lists every clip with its date, and lets me tick the platforms I've posted to. That's the whole thing. A ledger — no automation, no clever tricks.
I called it Widepost. It's free while in beta, and it will stay simple: your platforms, your folder, your records, all on your own machine.
Why I write about it here
Because the problem turned out not to be mine alone. Anyone who publishes to more than one place eventually hits the same wall: the work is easy to do and hard to keep track of. And there's a bigger lesson I keep circling back to — the craft is rarely the constraint. Getting it in front of people, consistently, is.
I write notes here about that: publishing, building small things, and what twenty years of a daily practice teaches you about showing up. If any of it sounds like your problem, you're in the right place.