Tips and best practices for your iPhone, best viewed on your iPhone. Remember: Search is your friend.
Social networking is branching out an an amazing rate. In the blogosphere many of the lengthy blog have been replaced by micro-blogs. A micro-blog is designed for short posts that often contain media like links, photos, movies and audio. More of a "Hey look what I saw" type post without a lot of need for more than a quick quip. Tumblr is a strong contender for this market. It's free and so simple to set up, yet hackable for those who like to tinker. And typically the screen area is smaller and fonts are larger than traditional blogs, so Tumlblogs display great on an iPhone in Safari.
There are currently four apps designed for posting to Tumblr directly from your iPhone. I like Tumble. It's free and allows for fast blogging and posting. The interface is extremely logical and simple. The opening screen gives you five options to post: text, quote, url, photo or the contents of a Tumblr chat. Tap one, a dedicated editor opens and your press the post button. Even simpler than posting through Tumblr itself. Once you've set your Tumblr username and password in Tumble for posting you won't have to fool with them again.
Currently there's no interface to see your posts or modify old posts. But this is simple enough to do through Safari. Save your Tumblr site or dashboard on your home screen next to Tumble and you'll have easy access to check out your posts. Here is my Tumblog of poems and drawings made on my iPhone with the Sketches app.
I like the simplicty and speed of Tumble so much, I kind of hope they don't integrate more complex features. Tumble had pretty near flawless fuction, so why mess with a good thing?
Tips
- Tumble is capable of sending html code. It's cumbersome to type tags so you probably won't do much of it. I tested emphasis and links.
For those who blog with Blogger, the only option for iPhone has been blogging by mail. This is not a bad option since you can also send photos to your blog as well as text. Now BlogPress allows more blogging flexibility:
- Edit older posts
- HTML formatting
- Post to multiple blogs including Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, WorsPress, Movable Type and TypePad
- Picasa photo loading
Cool. Does it work? This entry was created with it.
However there are issues. It is not really a WYSIWYG rich text editor as claimed. I think this is more a result of the developer's poor command of English. You can insert an image in the middle of your text. If you want rich text, or links you'll need to code them yourself. And s editing old posts is far from WYSIWYG: You need a basic knowledge of HTML to read as well as not screw up posts.
The app is a little pricey at $10. I hope the developer will grow it. If he can't make a real WYSIWYG editor (not a simple feat) then he needs to make some sort of HTML tagging feature or the posting abilities will remain what you can already do with free blogging by mail. The photos can't be resized from full screen and there are currently some rendering issues with the text field not showing type.
While overpriced the app is decent enough in what it really does that serious bloggers will probably be happy with the added function.
With Blogger.com you can blog by email. You can even include a photo from your iPhone when you post your entry. This makes blogging while rolling easy. You need to set this up first inside of Blogger. Once you've created a blog, go to Settings>Email. Set a secret word for your blogger address. You might want to put this email address in your Contacts.
To blog, send your entry to this address. The subject line will become the title and the body of the email will become the entry. That's it.
To send a photo with your entry, just pick a photo from the camera roll or from your iPhone's photo library. At the bottom left of the screen tap the Share button. (The one with the arrow coming out of the image. If there's no button, tap your screen and it will appear.) Tap Email Photo. Put your entry title in the subject line. Put your entry text in the body of the email above the photo. (Blogger seems to cut off all text after the photo.) Mail it. About two minutes later your entry is up. Notes that Blogger will put your text after the image.
Advanced notes: You can delete you signature or ads if your mail providers adds them by typing #end at the end of your email. Your iPhone composes with only plain text mail so html tags don't work.
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Social networking is branching out an an amazing rate. In the blogosphere many of the lengthy blog have been replaced by micro-blogs. A micro-blog is designed for short posts that often contain media like links, photos, movies and audio. More of a "Hey look what I saw" type post without a lot of need for more than a quick quip. Tumblr is a strong contender for this market. It's free and so simple to set up, yet hackable for those who like to tinker. And typically the screen area is smaller and fonts are larger than traditional blogs, so Tumlblogs display great on an iPhone in Safari.
