Here’s a confession : the last 2 blog posts on Mobility Mind were written and uploaded from my iPhone. For the past week or so I have been playing around with WordPress for the iPhone. I’m happy to say that it works quite well.

WordPress is a popular blogging tool that powers hundreds if not thousands of websites, including Mobility Mind. The WordPress for iPhone application makes creating and uploading posts to your server quite easy.

First of all, you need to set up the iPhone app to work with your server. This is a painless and straightforward process — all you need are your server address, username and password. WordPress for iPhone automatically connects and downloads the last 10 posts (or 30, or 50 depending on your preferences). You can set up multiple blogs.

For a 1.0 product, WordPress for iPhone is not perfect, but does its job well. You can add tags, choose categories and even add photos to your blog posts.

Adding photos is easy — the app will prompt you to either choose a photo from your existing photo library, or take a new photo. Photos are resized to 640×480 resolution and a thumbnail is appended to your post. The ability to add photos is surprisingly powerful. When coupled with the iPhone 2.0 ability to take screen shots, I can accomplish quite a lot.

For example, I can browse to a web site in Safari, zoom into the appropriate section, and take a screen shot. This feature is very useful for writing reviews like this one as well, as I can capture the appropriate screens. As an example in this post, I have added a few screen shots of me writing this article!

Once you’re done with a blog post, you can use the app’s built-in preview feature. You’ll see what the post looks like after it’s published, complete with your blog’s template, including ads.

Limitations and possible improvements

The first time I tried to publish a post using WordPress for iPhone, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. To publish an article, you need to change the status from “draft” to “published”. This definitely needs to be fixed — I was looking for a “publish” button but could not find it.

While I can easily add photos, there’s no control over the appearance of photos. For example, I can’t resize or rotate. Sometimes taking a landscape-oriented screenshot is much better.

There is also no support for formatting — at least, there’s no obvious way to do it. I have yet to try using HTML code, but there should be a way to do simple formatting eg bold, italics or creating links.

What I do is after publishing, once I am in front of a computer then I will go back and do the necessary editing. This is not ideal but it works.

Overall, I am fairly satisfied with WordPress for the iPhone. It works well because I can easily work on a blog post the same way that I consume content ok the iPhone — that is, in small chunks at a time. The iPhone (or other smartphones) are great for filling in “dead time”, ie the many 3-10 minute quiet periods throughout the day I can see myself updating this blog while waiting in a queue, or (more likely) while stuck in a traffic jam.

I’m looking forward to new versions of the WordPress for iPhone app. The price : free.

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Filed under: iPhone • Mobile Software

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