Blogging

So they added a new WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress own app for iOS. And to my Initial amazement it looks like it handles images the correct way by first uploading them, and then gives you the different automatically created sizes done by the server. Maybe I’m finally able to upload images and have Retina support without having to use my Editorial workflow? But when looking at the generated HTML, the height and width of the images is set to zero. It points the URL to the full resolution image, even if you select a smaller one. Not good. If you save a draft, it forgets your image settings like alignment and title. ...

I’ve tried a lot of blogging apps for the iPad, but none of them handles images the way I want. Images gets the weird name iOS has assigned to them which is not good for SEO. When I upload images to Wordpress, I want them to end up in the Wordpress Media Library and have all the theme defined sizes created automatically. Just like when you upload from the web interface in Wordpress. There’s an added problem when you want your site to support images displayed on a Retina or high DPI device, showing the picture in high resolution using a plugin like WP Retina x2. My favourite text editor on iOS is Editorial app, So I made this Workflow so I can do the naming, resizing and uploading of the images directly inside the app from my iPad or iPhone 6 Plus. You can select which of the theme defined image sizes you want to display and also set the image alignment. This workflow works excellent with the WP Retina x2 plugin, which is the one I use on my site. When everything is done, you have an MultiMarkdown referred image link at the cursor position in the text editor, and the image link and information like width, height and alt-text is added to the end of the document. This makes a very convenient way of blogging on the iPad. ...

Using Marsedit 3 I’ve been dabbling around with different blog editors for Mac now for a while, trying to find one that suits my needs. I usually try to do most of my blogging on my iPad, but when writing on my Mac I’ve used Byword in combination with Marked2 to do the initial texts written in Markdown. ...

There are several JPEG image compression tools available that takes a jpeg file and reduces the size of the photo without altering the quality. But which one works best for posting images on a website? I was curious, so I took the tools I usually use and put them through the compress photo function. All applications tested claims not to lower the quality of the image. I’m concentrating on testing jpeg files here, and do a followup article later with results for optimizing PNG files. ...

Inserting Score Card Research javascript After doing some research using Google Webmaster Tools to get my images indexed, I discovered that a JavaScript called b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js was loading without me installing it. I found out that the Disqus comment system adds it without my knowledge. That’s not ok, so I have decided to remove Disqus from my blog. It’s unfortunate, because it is a pretty good system. I like the ease of making comments, and also that you can follow comments you made on different sites with ease. But if they try to do sneaky stuff like that, they’ll end up in /dev/null (in the trashcan for non geeks). After searching with Google I found that this isn’t something new. It’s been going on for quite some time. Thankfully I have all my comments stored, so I’ll just have to use the build-in comment system in Wordpress. ...

Update: A newer, better version has been created. You can download it here. I use the excellent iPad app Editorial as my preferred text editor. I want to be able to upload images directly from Editorial to WordPress, using xmlrpc, so the images ends up in the media gallery, the files in the correct folders, thumbnails made and a Markdown link with the correct URL is created. So I’ve written a workflow you can download that gives you the ability to select some text (that will be the alt text for the image), and either upload the image in the original size, or resize the width to the dimension you specify. After the image is uploaded, the Markdown image code is inserted. Another good thing is that you have the ability to name the image file, which I haven’t seen in other solutions, like in Poster App, where you get the cryptical iOS internal name of the image. Not so SEO friendly. The easiest solution was to use the wordpress_xmlrpc module, so that needs to be installed before you can use the workflow! but I’ve written a guide about how to install the module/library here. If you forget to install it beforehand, you will get this dialog box with instructions on how to install it if you start the workflow. ...

I want to be able to share interesting web pages on my Wordpress blog using iOS directly from Safari using a bookmark and a Pythonista Python script. The script takes the URL of the page, any text you copied and the page title, formats it in Markdown and creates a new post in Poster App automatically. ...

iPad and MultiMarkdown Supported Apps Updated 2014–07–06 Since I originally wrote this article, much has happened. The Elements app looks like it’s been discontinued because I couldn’t find it in the AppStore, so I have removed it from the comparison table. I’ve added my new favourite iOS text editor, Editorial which is an amazing app for configure your text workflow just the way you like it. IA Writer has added support for MultiMarkdown so I added it to the list as well. ...