Poster: Best iOS blog editor

September 30, 2012October 27, 2012 ~ Judi Sohn

“You should get back to blogging.” Heard that many times. I love blogging. I miss blogging.

One of the many reasons I let this blog get stale was the amount of time I now spend on iOS. I have a computer in the basement for work. Other than that, I’m on an iPhone or iPad and I blog best first thing in the morning. Even though I use an external keyboard with my iPad, when the urge hits to share something with the world it was easier to click a button and compose a simple tweet or Facebook update.

Mobile Safari and the WordPress browser editor are not a good combination. Painful. I tried blogging a few times from the official WordPress app but it’s terrible too. It’s fine for moderating comments, frustrating for composing complete posts.

Late last week, I found Poster. It’s a universal app for $3.99 and if you still believe in blogging, it’s worth every cent. I don’t know which impresses me more, that it’s so good and beautiful or that it was developed by a college kid who did it while teaching himself how to code for iOS.

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What do Mac folks use to edit their blogs offline?

September 24, 2009 ~ Judi Sohn ~ 3 Comments

I’m amazed that after all these years, no one has come out with a killer offline blog editor for the Mac yet. It seems like there’s more development energy going towards iPhone blog editors than desktop versions.

I really liked working in Windows Live Writer back when I was a fulltime Windows user. I loved that once configured, the editing window used your blog’s own style sheet so your typing appeared exactly how it would look on the blog. The problem was that the code was pure Microsoft: crap. Full of unnecessary tags and other junk that caused all sorts of problems. And I now only run Windows XP in VMWare Fusion when I absolutely have to.

As I see it, if you want to use an offline editor on a Mac you only have 3 choices, each with its own strengths and overwhelming weaknesses.

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WordPress theme reverts to default – solved?

June 6, 2009 ~ Judi Sohn ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been struggling with this for as long as I’ve had this site on WordPress (since January 2007). I think (hope) I’ve finally found the solution.

The problem: From time to time, for no apparent reason and based on no obvious trigger, the theme would revert to the default WordPress theme.

Strangely enough, when I checked the theme in WordPress Appearance settings, it would be set to the correct theme and say the files were in the right place, but the site would look like something else. I’d have to re-activate the correct theme to get the site to use the current theme. Unfortunately when I did, I lost all the custom settings in my Thesis theme and would have to start over.

I Googled for solutions a few times. Many sites talked about the issue. Most pointed to incorrect installation of the WP Mobile plug-in as the culprit. That wasn’t my problem. Most recommended a hack solution of copying the site’s theme into the default folder, so even when it reverted it would look correct. Sure, that worked. Except when I tried to change theme settings they wouldn’t take because the changes were happening in the wrong folder. I recently upgraded to Thesis 1.5 and now when the site reverted to the default theme which still had older Thesis files, the layout broke completely.

No way of troubleshooting with trial and error because I couldn’t replicate the problem consistently. Sometimes I’d go for weeks without it reverting to default. Sometimes it happened multiple times a day.

This morning, after loading the site and finding it blank (!!) and yet again resetting the theme and all its options, I Googled one last time before inevitably having to copy Thesis 1.5 into the Default folder.

How did I miss this page from 2007 with a solution I hadn’t tried before?

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