Blogging on the iPad
The time I’ve been spending with my iPad has been sporadic at best. I love the thing, but my schedule doesn’t allow me to use it as much as I had hoped over these last few weeks. This past weekend, I finally had a chance to sit down with it and write a single blog post for another site I’m working on. I was hoping that the iPad’s version of Safari would run WordPress as well as its desktop counterpart, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
WordPress’s back-end site works great with the iPad. The only time I had a problem was typing in the Visual editor. When I tried to tap the text edit area, Safari would try and highlight a block of text which didn’t yet exist, and not allow me to edit there at all, not even place the cursor where it belonged. I tried the Opera browser and had similar results. If you click on the HTML tab, Safari works perfectly. Not having the visual editor made writing a bit of a hassle since using the links tool is the easiest way to add links. Typing them by hand is entirely possible, but I found that working with the < and > keys alone aren’t a problem, but when you’re constantly using <, >, =, and ” so much, typing on the virtual keyboard tends to be troublesome since you’re always looking for keys that don’t correspond to locations on a regular keyboard. Typing on the keyboard itself is a breeze, so long as you don’t have to mess with some of the non-alphabet characters.
After typing the blog post using the HTML editor, I switched back to the Visual tab, and tried to highlight text to see if I could add a URL to highlighted text. As before, trying to highlight text or set a cursor position didn’t work, Safari tried highlighting the entire paragraph. This made the whole Visual tab useless.
The only saving grace I had was using the free WordPress app for the iPad. It’s a decent editor, it grabs your posts from your WordPress blog, create new ones, edit ones that already exist, and send them to your blog. You can even insert images. However, it’s not a WYSIWYG editor which is surprising and disappointing since I would have expected a blog editor to have that feature. Alas, I’m stuck with HTML editing which is OK, but I might as well stay in the web application so long as I have an internet connection. In fact, I don’t know what would happen if I lost my internet connection while using this app. Thinking back, I probably should have tried that to see if WordPress would save the document locally. It has some photo capabilities which are rudimentary at best. This app needs a major upgrade, but it’s good if you need to edit something, don’t have Pages, and don’t want to use the Notes editor.
I’m sure some of you are wondering if I used an external Bluetooth keyboard for this. No, I did not. The point of this exercise was to try to edit a blog post on the go, when you don’t have a keyboard, or using one is cumbersome. I would like to see what the people that create MarsEdit do with the iPad, if anything. Someone needs to step up and create a powerful WordPress blog editor, and soon. The problems with Safari may not be updated in a timely manner, and although I can type HTML with my eyes closed, I’d rather not because it slows me down just a bit, especially when not using a standard keyboard.
Category: How-Tos, Technology
When I first bought my iPhone, I bought all the blogging apps that were available, one after another, in the hopes of finding one which would allow me to blog effectively “from the field”.
That never happened.
I wish someone would develop an app which allows us to access every function available from using a web browser from our computers. The technology’s there. Someone just has to code the damn app.
Roger,
I’d be happy with just a decent editor. The problem with incorporating all the functions is that they’d have to be duplicated in the app as they appear in WordPress or Drupal, which isn’t a trivial task. Still, some BASIC stuff should be there.