I enjoy blogging. I never claimed to to be great at it and I don't have a substantial number of readers, but I find the practice of writing to be cathartic. Sometimes it's even helpful, as I forget the keyboard shortcuts to applications like Screen and OH HOW HANDY I posted them on my blog.
I also find myself traveling around quite a bit. I probably find myself on a bus back to my home in PA once a month, and that bus trip is between three and four hours long.
Ugh.
Sometimes I fill the time with podcasts or reading. But other times I want to feel more productive. Writing a blog post entry scratches that itch nicely.
Of course there are a few problems.
I tried using the laptop. Being a bus, there really isn't a lot of room to get situated with a laptop, but I've managed to do it. The next obstacle I commonly encounter is internet access; I don't have a cellular hotspot device, my phone doesn't support tethering and even if it did, you're either unfamiliar with traveling through PA or wildly optimistic to think cell coverage would work without frequent drops. Some of the buses offer wifi, but they are still tethered to the cell network and prone to dropping out; that is, when they have wifi working at all.
My wife bought me an iPad Mini as an early birthday present. I thought, "It's small but not too small, I don't mind the keyboard, maybe there is an app to blog on the iPad..."
I thought there would be many. There weren't. The ones I did find weren't that great.
I stopped searching when I found Blogsy.
Blogsy worked with Blogger (required!), let me access photos on my iPad (handy!) and format my text (nice!).
Best feature for me: no Internet connection required (perfect!). Blog posts could be composed locally and uploaded later, meaning the crappy bus wifi wasn't an issue (unless I needed to research something or test links for a post...that got a little irritating, but was hardly Blogsy's fault.)
Another bonus: Blogsy can access many other sites to link content to your posts (when there's Internet access, of course.) The right side of my screenshot has an iconic display of services like YouTube, Facebook and Picasa in addition to the local photo storage.
Another feature some users will appreciate is access to the raw HTML with the swipe of some fingers. So far I've had to use it to tune the positioning of some tags for links, but if you like exact control over the appearance of your posts then this is a surprisingly handy feature to find in an iPad blog editor.
New users can be easily overwhelmed with the interface; Blogsy has PLENTY of documentation available as well as training videos and FAQ's, both on the website and linked within the app.
In my usage of Blogsy I've had two consistent issues. One, the publishing date setting doesn't seem to like to hold the date while I'm editing. It's FANTASTIC that I can still control when the post goes up, as I'm often queuing posts to appear over the next several days, but the Publish Date setting seems to like resetting to "Auto" instead of the specific date and time I set.
The second issue is the disappearance of my text behind the virtual keyboard as I'm typing. I'm not sure if that's a Blogsy thing or an iPad thing; can the app detect when the cursor is disappearing from view? I end up having to pause and scroll the page so I can review what I'm typing.
Feature requests? It would be nice to get some stats off the blog using Blogsy. For example, how many views has a particular post received? Perhaps the authors of the app want to focus on Blogsy as a posting editor more than a blog management platform, but when the app already has nice touches such as the word count I think statistics would be an equally nice touch.
Bottom line, if you enjoy blogging and occasionally want to write while at the park (as I am doing with his entry) or some other location where a laptop is a hindrance but your iPad is handy, give Blogsy a try. It's inexpensive and has more features than many bloggers would end up using while being compatible with every popular blog platform out there!
Posted with Blogsy
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