Mobile Blogging

I have a smartphone. I pay tons of money each month for a data plan. I want my smartphone to do everything including make me dinner and give me a massage each day. For some reason, I can’t seem to find an app for that. But I’m searching. On Saturday night I decided to try mobile blogging. I followed the instructions and linked my blog to my phone. In a few minutes I was easily publishing posts from my email. You can also publish using MMS or SMS.

However, I wanted more. I could add images. But the images were placed at the top of post. What if I wanted them at the end? What if I wanted them in the middle? What about formatting my text? Bold? Italics? Underline? And tags? And links? I really wanted to add links. I decided to check the Android Market for an application.

First up was Blogger’s official app – Blogger.

There’s honestly not much I can say about this application. I never got it to work. It opened; I connected my blog and it immediately forced closed. I tried several more times and it crashed HTC. I uninstalled and tried again and the same thing happened so I uninstalled and moved on.

Next I tried Blogger-Droid.

It’s pretty simple. I can add tags. I can add images. If I wanted to format text or add html links I could. However, I would need to type the html tags. That easily done for formatting text but I’m not sure that I want to type the html tags for URLs. I can add images but the images can only be placed at the beginning of the post. I can view and edit previous blog posts. I can also easily share posts via whatever media I chose – facebook, Twitter, text, email or even Springpad. I can publish a post as a draft and I can also schedule the time and date of the post. The view of my posts is my blog layout so I can see exactly how a post/image looks on my background. Pretty good. But I still wanted to test others.

Bloggeroid.

Bloggeroid’s interface is also simple and straightforward. I can format text using html tags with extra “<<” or I can use **bold** or __italic__. I like those options - much faster than typing tags. I can add multiple images and I can choose where in a post the images appear – win! However, I can’t view the pics when I pull up a post. I simply see an aqua box – fail! I can save posts to my SD card or I can publish them as drafts. There’s no option to schedule a post for a later date. Links could be added using html tags. You cannot share posts from Bloggeroid

Blogaway

Blogaway has a toolbar that allows you to format your text. I had a little trouble using this but I think it may be easier than I think. You select the text and then choose to make it bold, italicized, underlined or in a different colour. You can save drafts to your phone or to your blog. However, you cannot edit drafts that have been saved to your blog - #fail. You can only edit drafts that have been saved to phone. You can add images but only one image – another fail. However, you can easily add links – win! You can also easily share your posts.

	Format text	Images	Links	Share posts	Editing drafts	Publish Later	Save to Phone
Blogger-Droid	Html	Multiple images –one location	Write own tags	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Bloggeroid	Html	Multiple images – choose location	Write own tags	No	Yes	No	Yes
Blogaway	Toolbar	One image – one location	Add link option	Yes	Cannot edit drafts saved to blog	No	Yes

I think I may need to use a combination of applications until I find one that suits my needs or until I learn to develop my own.