So here’s a question for the mobile bloggers out there. What has been your most unique, or most memorable mobile post? Whether it was posting from Kazakhstan while riding steppe ponies, from under your car while changing your oil, or the best prose you’ve written while blogging from your iPhone — add a comment and let us know.
Keep it G-rated and come back from time to time to see what others have shared.
I’ll start off by sharing a not-very exciting example. Recently I took the family to Zion’s National Park and we were briefly rained “in” at the main building. Being the OCD developer that I am, I turned my wife and kids loose in the souvenir store and began testing some code I had recently written by posting several brief entries to my blog. They consisted mostly of “test 1″ and “test 1″ but hey – that’s the kind of exciting life I live… So, the location was a bit interesting, the prose – not.
I’m sure many of you can top that (not hard!) so drop a comment and get the ball rolling!
Surely everyone is using Twitter from their mobile, rather than updating their blog…
I don’t have an iPhone, but a NokiaN95, and my most stunning mobile post was just after discovering it’s not possible to upload any pictures with the plugins I’m using.
So, nothing more than “I’m in Paris right now and they have free Wifi everywhere!!!111w00t!”.
I’d love to hear if there’s something which makes me able to upload pictures.
We had a massive light post fall down on our university campus, so I snapped a picture and wrote briefly about it, uploading it all through the WordPress iPhone Application. I found out later that this all works better through the regular web interface in Mobile Safari
I’ve only done one as a test of the WP iPhone client, and I doubt I’ll do many more as the client was rather disappointing. Hopefully it’ll get an overhaul soon.
Thanks for your comment Matthew – specifically what was the disappointing factor?
I had to reinstall it real quick to see what was lacking.
Can only see X recent posts/pages
Cannot reply to comments (spam, delete, un/approve are only options)
Cannot set an excerpt (my theme uses excerpts on the front page)
Cannot interact with plugins (I set a custom description in All-In-One SEO for every post and page)
Cannot modify code (which means I can’t set pictures in-line, for instance, or set a block quote, or center something, etc.)
Cannot upload anything but pictures (mobile podcasting? LiveJournal has had the ability to do voice-posts from a phone for years)
Cannot create links (or embed media, such as YouTube videos)
That’s just what is related to posting, and just off the top of my head in a few minutes of browsing through the application again. I understand that an app can’t be everything, so there are features of the admin interface you wouldn’t necessarily see there (like modifying settings), but there are a lot of what I would consider basic things that simply aren’t do-able.
I also recognize that I haven’t tested typing code into the app to see if it works. Even if it does, typing out code to create links or embed media doesn’t sound worthwhile to me when I can more quickly do it through Mobile Safari. Over wifi I can usually open Safari, go to my site, hit Site Admin, and then New Post more quickly than the WordPress application loads.
On the flip side, when using WordPress through Safari Mobile, being unable to type into the rich text editor is also a pain, but one I can deal with. At least I can set an excerpt and whatnot, and the quicktag buttons in the Code editor work just fine (though you have to switch in and out of the keyboard to hit them).
Just downloaded and after a little reading and testing I got the following result. Check it out. http://www.emh3.com/web/real-estate-post-from-iphone/
Very happy with it! Wish list…..?! Ability to post Description, keywords and title from with app.
Thanks!
Adrian
Loved that I could be blogging at 11,000 feet on the tram at Snowbird: Snowbird Day 2
My wife and I were at the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The sunset was so magical on Lake Superior and I had to share that instantly with the Edge conn I had via my iPhone! Of course I daily post screenshots of various apps we review in our iPhone blog, thanks to WordPress on iPhone!
[...] Your Most Interesting Mobile Post? So here’s a question for the mobile bloggers out there. What has been your most unique, or most memorable [...] [...]
Mine would be walking out of a film premiere and going straight to work at a nearby stool to punch out my review beating all the other maniacs racing home to their computer.
Our family has been on a x-country trip for the last month. I’ve been having my kids post updates along the way detailing what they’ve seen, heard, and done all using acombo of Notes and the iPhone app.
The vast majority of this blog was done using the iPhone and the WordPress app.
http://www.jerseysandhockeylove.com/wcht/
I was updating games and sending pictures directly from my seat or from my travels. I could show where I was, and send some really good cell phone pics of the scenery. It was like taking a bunch of people along with me on a road trip.
If anything, I didn’t care for the bulkiness of the WordPress app. Compared to the twitter apps I use, nothing happened fast. I think this was before landscape mode came into play, so the next road trip will afford a better shakedown. And the next trip will use P2 for a theme, rather than Prologue. Prologue was great, but not as readable as P2.
As for a single post, this one could be it.
http://www.jerseysandhockeylove.com/wcht/archives/272
I don’t know the realm of possibility here, and I apologize for posting off-topic, but I wish the iPhone app were a bit sexier to use. The web interface is excellent. If administration/posting UI for the iPhone app had a similar feel (and a rich text editor), I think it’d be a lot more heavily used.
We’re actually doing a lot of work on the UI – the next version will be sexier, I promise. A rich-text editor isn’t on the cards for the next release, but it’s a great suggestion.
I went on a month-long trip to Italy, and posted daily blog updates. After the first 2 days, though, I managed to kill the WP iPhone app. I upgraded it on my phone, but was still running an earlier version of WP on my site. I think it was 2.6…
The rest of the trip, I simply wrote in the Notes app and pasted into the post page in mobile Safari.
Lots of fun, and kept all of my jealous friends updated!
As far as “most interesting mobile post” goes, I have to thank you all for my most popular category on my homesite. In order to review the WordPress app for AppAdvice.com, I started a segment on TeeMorris.com entitled Stranger on a Train. The idea of these postings is I must compose and publish a post while on the train commute home from work, each post usually ending with a self-portrait (proof that I am, indeed, on the train).
I have done many-a-rant, an occasional review, and even dropped in a podcast or two (something I need to get back into again). No category is as popular, though, as Stranger on a Train. People really dig it. It would have never happened without this killer application!
“Sherbet Sky”
http://www.zombieprocess.net/?p=222
I don’t travel as much as I’d like. I’m also far too connected to my computer(s). I was visiting Western Michigan and decided to leave the laptop at home, so I gave WordPress for iPhone a shot. Since I lacked the means to process anything out of my big SLR camera, iPhone photos had to do for illustration.
I like the app, generally. It was responsive and I could do most of what I wanted for quick posts. Since what I do is essentially a photoblog, the workflow ended up like so:
* Create a new entry, name and categorize it
* Add a photo from the iPhone’s library (I wanted the photo at the top of each post, rather than the default bottom position)
* Write the text and check for iPhone typos
* Save a local draft
* Preview and then save to online draft
* Log in to my WordPress admin dashboard to flip a widget bit that notifies Twitter (not quite ready for this to be automatic)
* Publish live
Preview in the app won’t do anything with any of my templates, in local draft nor in online draft. This might be confused by the fact that I have a complicated theme installed plus a mobile theme pack with a switch mechanism. Not that big a deal, but it would have been cool if it had worked.
I understand, too, the inability to interact with plug-ins like the Twitter gadget. I realize I can retract a post by saving it back into draft status, but it’d be nice to be able to delete one outright. I’m not sure why photo editing is only available in portrait mode, and the top 4 static lines take up so much real estate that the landscape editing interface isn’t very usable.
None of these things were show-stoppers. I was able to edit, post and moderate comments, so I’m happy. Great work, and I look forward to any improvements to come.
To begin testing the iPhone app for WordPress, I made a post sitting in my balcony, over my WiFi connection (There’s nothing special here, just wanted to get it to work). I faced a few glitches, namely:
1. Posts not being saved
2. Icons for uploading photos disappearing randomly
3. Uploaded images don’t show in the images section in the App
4. Unable to edit posts
These were random errors, and after the app several times, seemed to disappear (temporarily, maybe). Anyway, here is the blog post: http://www.hasnainsaleem.org/archives/114
Regards,
Hasnain
My whole trip to Guatemala, and a few other places. Virtually everything with the Travel category on my blog was done from my iPhone.
This one stands out, though:
http://electroweb.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/making-the-world-slightly-smaller/
The rest are here:
http://electroweb.wordpress.com/category/travel/
I was out tonight for a networking meeting at a local pub and was stood up. So I wrote: How you should handle being stood up.
Awesome list, totally loved it!
I’ve seen a lot of comments from people who wanted transfer pictures from digital camera. Ok, yes … we can do it straight from the Iphone, but for thos who are using a digital camera for better quality purposes, there is no easy ways to do it.
I can now blog with only my phone ( which is not an Iphone ), an Ipod Touch and my Nikon Digital Camera from anywhere in the world a very low cost ( In term of data transfer cost ).
You can find all the detail in the following post:
http://arcall.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/optimization-in-the-mobile-blogging-portable-solutions/
Hope you will enjoy and I am available for any questions.
Have a good one.
Mine would have to be waiting for the train in Paris to go to Giverny to see Monet’s house.
http://www.josharonoff.com/v6/the-human-element/waiting-on-a-train/
My lap is broken “literally” right now, so my great experience was to post last week from this app for the first time in my life, about a dream i had before forgetting it at all. Otherwise i would had to take a shower and run to the university’s pc’s. But at that point usually the dream has gone already. And hand writing is not an option. Here is the post (in spanish, of course):
http://lasletrasmudas.com/551/erotismo/hoy-sone-con-un-amor/
Bye the way, the app is great for making drafts and avoiding your ideas to slip out to nowhere land. Great, because its available quick and offline if you are far from a wifi (most of the time). i let the formatting matter, the tags & the code stuff for later when i manage to get onto a PC, and is when i hit the PUBLISH botton.
Suggestion & Petition: I would love the feature to being able to manage my links too & the ability to add new ones. Waiting for your next release from the apple store’s notification update system.
Thanks Matthew – we’re always looking for ways to improve and features that are interesting to WP app users. This is a great list.