Blog

This is the second post concerning the mobile web. In following posts I’ll consider in more detail some of the tasks that can increase your mobile web productivity and some of the tools that can be used to conduct these tasks. This installment will concentrate on mobile blogging.

Blogging

Finding the time to write blog content is one of the hardest tasks of my personal working week. Should be easy right? Talking about topics very pertinent to you and your industry. But fact is thinking about topics, writing the content and taking care of all the other necessaries with copy writing is time consuming, but critically necessary.

This is an ideal task to be conducted mobiley. How often do you get inspiration/ideas whilst interacting with the world around you? Especially outside of the office.

Blogging mobiley allows you to easily note potential topic areas, draft post content and make timely refinements to your posts. All of which can be done in draft mode behind the scenes of your live blog.

When you are ready to publish your content you have the ability to add tags and categories to your posts just as you would usually. Also some tools supply the options to preview your posts in your blog using your current blog theme as well as add images and also schedule posts to be published at a future date.

Need supplimentary information, data or opinion about your topic area? That’s when the mobile web browser comes into play, allowing you to couple the writing power of mobile blogging with data retrieval from the web.

Blogging platforms and the tools available

The tools available to you for mobile blogging vary to a certain degree on the blogging platform you are using. Eh? you say? basically there are a large number (quite a large number if you include absolutely all of them) of blogging software available which will allow you to post content to the web. What I consider to be the top choices are:

• WordPress
• Google Blogger
• Six Apart TypePad

This is not a finite list by any means. If you would like to recommend other platforms feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Platform specific Tools

Another question which will determine the tools available to you for mobile blogging is the mobile device itself. With that considered I will detail a few of the best tools for the job.

WordPress

WordPress is the platform of choice here at Visual Blaze. Mobile blogging for WordPress can be performed with just about any device that can access the web. This will require one of a number of ‘plugins’ available for WordPress to allow your blog to ‘talk’ to your mobile device.

But once this is done you have the ability to talk to your blog from anywhere with your mobile device. These plugins usually create a ‘lite’ administration control panel that is text based so to reduce the load on your phones data connection.

WordPress also allows for the ability to email posts to your blog for publishing. This means that any email enabled mobile device can submit posts to a WordPress blog.

For IPhone users, the WordPress app for IPhone is a fantastic way to work with your blog on the go. It has a large array of features (all the ones mentioned earlier in the post) that are all available from within the WordPress App itself. Its also free so definitely worth a look if this is your mobile device of choice. See iphone.wordpress.org for more information or to download.

Google Blogger

For those of you who use Google Blogger, there are also a number of options available across web enabled mobile devices. Like WordPress, Google Blogger can accept posts via email, as well as MMS.

Google Blogger also creates an option for those of you WITHOUT web enabled devices, in allowing posts to be submitted via regular SMS (text messages) also. However, whilst this creates a great option for ‘blogging for all’, relying on creating blog content via some phones SMS interface can be cumbersome at best. for a more in depth look at these techniques for mobile blogging with Google Blogger see here.

For Blackberry, IPhone and other device users, Shozu provides an app that can allow you to interface with your Google Blogger account.

TypePad

Six Apart’s TypePad has numerous options for mobile blogging also. A comprehensive list of devices that it has built apps for can be found here and include IPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices.

TypePad, also allows for email and sms updates.

BlogPress for Iphone – for all of them!

If you are an IPhone user, there is an app available called BlogPress which allows you to work with any of the blog platforms mentioned in this post.

It really does work

In part one of this mobile web series I talked about converting those ‘lost hours’ into productive time via the mobile web.

The mobile web really can help you make better use of your time. I drafted this very post in a car on I-65 from Nashville via WordPress Mobile for IPhone. 4.5 hours of what would have been complete downtime otherwise.

If you need help with blog technologies and/or their usage via mobile devices contact Indianapolis Web Design firm Visual Blaze today