Blogging on the road

With the recent move to Blot.im as my blogging platform it has rekindled my enjoyment for publishing something from time to time. I was going on a family visit for one week and decided to see how I would fair with just my iPhone and iPad to publish something on my blog while abroad.

Before embarking on my trip I already had a clear idea of the minimum set of applications I would probably be using, these where

• Dropbox (Universal) - Free
• Editorial (Universal) - € 9.99
• Pixelmator (Universal) - € 4.99
• TextExpander 3 + custom keyboard (Universal) - € 4.99
• Coda for iOS (Universal) - € 9,99

And not so much for blogging but more for my own protection online (public Wi-Fi etc.)

• Cloak - Super Simple VPN (Universal) - Free (requires a subscription for a week, a month or a year)

Editing

Editing of this article has completely done on my iPad mini using Editorial. In TextExpander I have created a template to start new posts. I could also have used the template feature of Editorial but since there is no version of Editorial for the Mac, using TextExpander provides me with a easy (and consistent) method of setting up a brand new post with all the necessary meta data already populated and ready to go, both on my Mac and my iOS device.

Date: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M
Permalink: 
Page: no
Tags: 

# Blog title

The actual blog post

When the article was finished I used the Dropbox application to move the physical file from the Drafts-folder to the folder holding the published posts for 2015. Maybe this action can also be done from within Editorial, but I could not find it (maybe one needs to build a custom workflow for it).

As it turned out during this trip I hadn’t had the need for Coda for iOS, but would have been very useful when I would have wanted to make changes to the look-n-feel of my blog. Maybe next time…

Graphics

During my trip I was using my iPhone 6 for taking pictures which, by means of iCloud, eventually were available on my iPad mini for editing. For now editing has been limited to cropping and resizing.

The initial cropping of the shots were doing in the stock Photos application, whereas the resizing was done using Pixelmator. The resizing was a bit tedious, but this might be largely related to the fact that this was the first time I was really using Pixelmator for anything other than just mucking about.

Also combined with the method for adding dropshadows dynamically using jQuery (see my post ‘Dropshadows for images’) most of my image manipulations will probably be limited to cropping and resizing.