Menu
Technology

Blogging from an iPad is not easy!

After setting up some magazines and some other showcase apps on my new iPad 2, I decided to start setting up programs on the iPad to help it replace my laptop on trips. First up was blogging. Little did I know how difficult it was going to be.

I had expected to use the normal MT interface to post to the Daily Update. The plan was to purchase Pages from the App Store(tm), compose a blog, and then copy-paste into the MT interface. The first thing I noticed was that I could not enter text into the body field, and when I tried to select Extended or anything else, it simply would not work. So I began researching MT apps that I could use to access the site.

The only one that I could find that people said interfaced with MT was BlogPress. It seemed to get some favorable reviews, and there was a bit of controversy regarding photos, but I was not interested in that since almost all my posts are just text. I bit the bullet and purchased the app, only to discover that for whatever reason, it would not access my MT setup on the Club Josh server. Usually, I can do some Google detective work to figure out the issue, but this time I was stumped.

Thankfully, I discovered that there was an update to the iMT plugin last year that makes it compatible with MT5 which I am currently using. Some further digging, and I discovered that I can enable support for iPad in the CGI settings. Hours later, I finally have my wireless keyboard paired with my iPad, and I was able to blog for the site.

Suprisingly, even the iMT will only allow me to select one category at a time. On the plus side, there is a beta of MT 5.1 which says it supports the latest web browsers, so I am hoping that it will finally allow me to access the dashboard via regular Safari.

At any rate, now that I have the iPad up and running, I will be downloading a few more apps to try and let me demo websites for clients and update them while on the road. **Fingers crossed**

One bonus note: I cannot tell you how much I love Flipboard! I was even able to get the RSS feed for the Club Josh Daily Update on it!