Blogging Tips

After two years of using a phone that was very “non-Web-friendly”, I finally got the chance last month to upgrade to an iPhone. The impact it has had on my mobility can not be understated. I now feel as if can manage any aspect of my business or personal life from my phone and it has actually been very freeing.

However, there is one work-related task that I can not do, blogging. Even with the installation of the WordPress for iPhone application, serious blogging is virtually impossible. Though I’ve used the iPhone app a few times to edit a post (fix a typo, an HTML error, etc.) and to take a post offline for a moment, using my iPhone, or any smartphone, to createan entire post from scratch is difficult to imagine .

So why is blogging from a phone so difficult? There are many different reasons, but the biggest has to do with the limitations of the platform.

Requirements

For a mobile phone, or even a computer, to meet my personal blogging needs, it has to be able to do the following things.

1. Quickly type out a 500-1200 word post
2. Easily edit HTML
3. Copy and paste links into the post
4. Take screen captures, including images of a specific size
5. Manipulate all elements of a post, including the custom fields and the excerpt
6. Spell check and preview posts before they go live (not that it always helps)

Most of these tasks are fairly basic and are not ver specific. As such, I’ve been able to blog easily from a Windows desktop, a Mac and a Linux netbook with ease. These are trivial tasks for any computer, even with limited hardware.

Phones, through no fault of their own, struggle with this. Their input is too limited and, currently, their hardware doesn’t allow the kind of multi-tasking that is needed (though that may change). Simply put, smartphones were not built for blogging and it shows when one sits down to give it a try.

The Limitations

The first major limitation is the keyboard on mobile phones. Where a very skilled Blackberry user can reach 75 words per minute, it is common for experienced typists to reach well above 120 and some above 200. Though most average users are much slower on both types of keyboards, most are much faster with their full keyboard, which lets users take advantage of all of their fingers, than a “thumbs only” keyboard.

It is also worth noting that mobile keyboards are also not well designed for coding HTML, may do not have the angle brackets clearly marked on the keyboard and others, like the iPhone, put them on separate screens or through odd function key combinations. However, all of these keyboard problems can be overcome by using an external keyboard, which many phones do have available.

But even if one does add on an external keyboard, which takes away some of the mobility, they still have to contend with the smaller screens on these phones. The WordPress app for the iphone actually makes this worse by taking up half the post screen with the title, tags, categories and status of the post, rather than moving some of them to a separate page. This increases the the amount of time spent scrolling and searching, especially on longer posts.

However, even more limiting is the lack of a mouse. This greatly impedes text manipulation and also makes copying and pasting elements much more difficult. Combine that with very limited, if any, multitasking and you have a recipe for disaster when it comes to trying to include elements from other sites or applications in your posts.

Still, for some cases it may be possible to create blog posts. If you don’t plan on making the post very long and only wish to include images from your phone, you may easily be able to blog from a smartphone. However, once your posts gets to be any length in size, even if it is possible to complete the post, it is significantly slower, so much so that it would likely be faster to use your phone to look up a library and drive there for Web access.

In short, even if blogging on a smartphone is possible in some cases, it is not practical in most.

What Does Work Well

But where blogging on a smart phone seems to struggle, all forms of microblogging work very well. Tumblr has a very useful application for the iPhone and Tweetie for the iPhone is one of my favorite Twitter client on any platform (I also use Tweetie for the Mac).

In both of those cases, the limitations brought on by not having a full computer are easily trumped by the convenience of being able to send out the post immediately. In fact, in many cases it would take longer to transfer an image or jot down a quote than it would be to post it wherever it is captured.

It is only when one gets into the mess of formatting longer posts or adding multiple images that the effort required to blog on a phone probably exceeds the effort needed to get to a computer.

Bottom Line

So will it every be practical to blog on a smartphone? For some bloggers it may already be. If you just post images or do very short posts, it may currently be worth your whole to blog from a Blackberry or an iPhone.

However, for those that need to post more text, format it carefully or go beyond just a single image per post, smartphone blogging probably isn’t ready yet. The good news is that it may be soon. Bluetooth keyboards and true multi-tasking, such as with the upcoming Palm Pre, may push us a lot closer, add to that additional input devices and more powerful screens, blogging from a mobile phone may be practical, even in situations where a computer might be available with some work.

In the meantime though, if ever I am going to be gone for a while and need to do some posting, I always still keep my netbook with me. Smartphones are not yet a full replacement for a decent laptop, at least not for bloggers, though it ie easy to imagine they might become one in a few years.

Your Thoughts?

What do you think about this? Do you blog from a mobile phone regularly? If so, what kind of blogging do you do and how do you make it work? Is there an iPhone or Blackberry app that I am not aware of?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this issue, leave a comment below or drop me a note on Twitter.