Since noonish last Tuesday until 5PM today, I’ve been on the road for the Thanksgiving holiday. The wife’s side of the family is all from Chicago, and I lived and worked there for close to 9 years. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law is a bit technophobic so doesn’t have Internet at her house. Heck, she just upgraded to cable this summer and I was lucky enough to finally have a full slate of turkey day sports for once.
This of course makes regular blogging a challenge. More after the break. Really!So I decided to give the WordPress for iOS app, a serious test drive on my iPhone. I cheated a little, but I’m giving it a thumbs up. With relatively minimal extra effort, I managed to successfully post the last 5 days, without using my laptop. In fact, I only once had to drag myself to a Starbucks and crack the laptop simply to check the time and numbers for a potential Monday telecom. Come to think of it, I probably could have gotten away with a text to deal with that situation.
How’d I cheat? I built up a backlog of mostly cooked posts, that needed minimal editing. These were then posted to my WordPress site with draft status. Then the WordPress iOS app was used for some light editing and clean up, before adjusting the publish date and switching the status to published.
I did however, do one full post completely in the iOS app. This wasn’t too bad, although the on-screen keyboard is obviously quite a bit slower than a real keyboard. So longer posts seem somewhat prohibitive. My main observation is that collecting and adding links definitely has high friction. On the desktop, you can multitask and fast switch between the browser, to look up stuff, and your favorite blog post editor, MarsEdit for me. Doesn’t work quite so well on the iPhone, although maybe that’s something I need to work on. I’ll also start thinking about the types of posts that make sense for a combo of an iPhone and WordPress. For example, impromptu photo posting feels like it would be quite natural, as opposed to my longer form text entries.