App of the Week: BlogPress

I’m often asked if I know any decent apps for writing blog posts on the iPhone or iPad. Until recently I’ve had to answer that I did not, but in hopes of not having to...

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I’m often asked if I know any decent apps for writing blog posts on the iPhone or iPad. Until recently I’ve had to answer that I did not, but in hopes of not having to answer that way again, I set off on a quest to rectify that.

After trying a large number of iOS apps, I came across BlogPress, a $2.99 app optimized for both iPhone and iPad that is simply fantastic. It supports all of the major blogging platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Live Journal, Drupal and more) and is super simple to both set-up and use.

BlogPress supports uploading photos and videos from inside the app to either the blog itself or to Picasa or YouTube, and supports embedding YouTube videos quickly into your post. It also will geotag your post using the location services in your iOS device and use that to insert a map link into your post.

While BlogPress is the most robust blogging tool that I’ve seen yet for the iPad, it does have some drawbacks. It has a call-out button for adding hyperlinks and a few other simple HTML tags, it is not a WYSIWYG editor and entering HTML into posts is an aggravating task with the notorious auto-correct feature, not to mention that it takes three key presses every time I want to enter in a < or > which makes crafting posts particularly hard. For an example, the <abbr> tag I wrote above kept getting “corrected” to abbreviation, which I found very frustrating.

For shorter posts on the go however, BlogPress is fantastic. I particularly like the Facebook and Twitter integration directly in the app which quickly allow me to share my new posts as I publish them without relying on blog plugins.

If you have been looking for something to make writing blog posts on your iPhone or iPod touch easier, give BlogPress a try.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location: Mountain View,United States