Blogging with an iPad

I’ve been carrying around the iPad for a couple of weeks now. It was my primary in Charlotte for the NRA convention and except for recording VC I haven’t used my MBP very much in the last two weeks.

The one massive failing so far is getting photos on and off the iPad. There are no built in USB ports and no SD slot. Apple makes a “camera kit” which consists of dongles for USB and SD card reading, and I have ordered it but it’s not here yet. I have had some success with emailing photos to myself or pulling them down off of the web. Neither are a very good solution. Dropbox works pretty good for getting files onto the iPad.

Another problem with blogging photos is that Safari seems to lack any access to the iPad file system for uploading. When I’m in the WordPress admin screen editing a post I can’t upload a photo or any other file for that matter. I’m pretty sure that’s a Safari bug because the WordPress app can access the photos on the iPad. I guess The Steve didn’t think anyone would ever want to upload a file.

Unfortunately the WordPress app kinda sucks for laying out a post so I have to put all the photos I want in a post then save it as a draft then open Safari to do everything else. Doable but a much bigger pain in the ass than it needs to be.

Here’s a screen capture from the WordPress app:

Sadly, i couldn’t even do that all on the iPad because the screen capture turned the image sideways and I had to edit it in iPhoto to rotate it back to horizontal and resize.

Clearly there is a LOT of work left to do with the iPad before it’s a viable notebook replacement for blogging.

UPDATE: Just tried the BlogPress app. It seems to work a lot better for layout than the WordPress app. At least I can intersperse photos and text.