Mobile blogging for dummies

Up until yesterday all my blogging had pretty much been from my Mac at home. Having a day in Newcastle on the way out has been a really smart move, as I got to practice photographing and blogging in “real world” conditions.

There might be a flaw in my thinking there, as I don’t know how comparable the “real world” of the Quayside in Newcastle might be to the Siberian tundra – the locals are both friendly, but one is a bit more chilly and and has a more limited phone signal.

First up was a trial of moving my pictures from my camera memory card to my iPad. This worked brilliantly using a proprietary plug in Apple card reader. The pictures are automatically detected and bingo, they are copied straight to your Photos folder in seconds. You then get to choose if you want to delete the images from the card or not. The only drawback I can see is that I don’t think you can select just to copy just a few images, the whole lot needs to be copied over and then selectively deleted.

Next step was to fire up Blogger, which I have found to be easy to use at home. However, I soon discovered that the mobile app for Blogger is actually about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The main drawback is with pictures. It does not let you choose where to place them, and looks like you can only add one per blog post. This is simply mad and frankly, disappointing.

After some quick research, I decided that the solution was to get hold of Blogpress from the app store and install it on my iPad. All I had to do then was to set up my passwords from Blogger and Picassa and hey presto I was up and running in minutes. In my view Blogpress looks slightly more “scrappy” visually when editing posts, but has much better functionality – including precise placement of images and control of their size. The published blog is therefore much better.

So I now have the choice of using Blogger or Blogpress – both sync all my posts whichever I choose to use. I’m also still using Twitterfeed. This automatically sends a Tweet when I post a new blog, with preset hash tags. Very neat and so far, very reliable.

I hope this might be of help if like me you are new to blogging – especially if its going to be for use on the move.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad