Monday, September 12, 2011

Blogging on the iPad

This should be a no brainer but I guess I am going to have to wait a bit. I use Blogspot, and nothing much has worked on the iPad up to now. Safari cannot run some of the script required for the normal browser interface, and still can't even after the upgrade to the browser interface that just arrived. Two different apps that claim to be able to do it don't, or at least not well.

Now Google has released their own Blogger app. Unfortunately it is designed for the iPhone, with no formatting options. It is fine for blogging on the run, will include photos, but that is about it. At least it can navigate you set of blog titles and show you your post.

How would all this work for students? Blogs are not naturally a student's area of play, and I always hope to encourage students as much as possible when they hit new areas by having interfaces or programs that work well and are full featured. So far if I wanted to introduce blogging to students I would not do it on the iPad!

I must point out however that I am only reflecting on what works (or does not work) for the Google blog site (http://www.blogger.com/). Word Press does seem to have better support on the iPad. What would I expect in the future? An app that....
  • allows you to move between your different blogs
  • displays the blog itself fully formatted (though you can use Safari for this)
  • allows reasonable HTML style formatting
  • allows picture insertion with basic formatting
  • supports link creation
  • gives access to the HTML code but also shows a WYSIWYG editor
  • spell checking
I don't really expect to get access to the quite complex CSS and template editing available on the Blogger site, but hey, Google, surprise me!

Andrew Lack

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