As regular listeners to the podcast will know, the Geek News Central website is powered by WordPress. Until now, I’ve always used the web interface to write posts. “It works” is about the kindest thing you can say about it.
Browsing the Palm App Catalog, I came across Poster for WordPress, an app that allows blogging from the Palm Pre and other WebOS devices. It had lots of good reviews so I paid up and downloaded Poster.
Poster can link to multiple blogs and obviously the first thing to do is to setup accounts for the WordPress sites that you want to access.
After setting up access to Geek News Central, Poster shows the last five posts on the site. More can be loaded if needed.
This is entire blog post is written entirely in Poster. You can embolden, italicise, underline and do all three. You can insert pictures or in this case, a screenshot of Poster’s editing screen.
When uploading images, there a four preset sizes you can choose from. Of course, hyperlinks are there too – here’s a link to the App Catalog. This doesn’t quite work perfectly in-line as the image or hyperlink seems to go at the end of the text. Not a problem if you write and edit linearly. However, if you are like me and write before editing in the pictures and hyperlinks, it’s a bit of a pain.
All is not lost as Poster offers three editing modes – Visual, Visual without images and HTML. So in this instance, you can swap to HTML view and then copy’n’paste to move stuff around.
Work in progress drafts can be saved to the blog but once the post is ready, tags and categories can be set before finally changing the status to Published and uploading it. The tags and categories are downloaded from the website itself so everything connects up.
Although I haven’t explored the app further, it also looks like you can work with comments, which could be pretty handy for the active blogger.
Overall, I’m impressed by this app and provided the end result – the post on GNC – is good, this app comes highly recommended.
Poster for WordPress by Gabriele Nizzoli is available from the AppCatalog for £1.59.
Update – I was pretty happy with way the post came out but to be upfront with the review, I added in a few extra links using the web interface and made one correction to the formatting.
Palm has let me down on two devices and their inablility to support syncing functions with my phone, which has now become a brick. I’ve moved to the Apple Itouch and love it. Until Palm spends more time and money in simplifying their devices I will never use another Palm device again.