Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).
Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn't saved if you're interrupted--even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from "I am so mad at you right now" to a simple "hello."
In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users' Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.
Other small changes include the app remembering which order you uploaded the photos in so that they display in that same order in your post. Although the app still hasn't been updated to include videos, which means 3GS owners will have to add whatever video they shot through WordPress' Web interface instead. The app also now stores passwords in a user's keychain, which means those credentials could be accessed by other applications you may want to give access to later on down the line--like, say an app that lets you post videos to a WordPress blog.
Oddly enough, the new WordPress app is completely different from the original, which still exists but will no longer be updated. The company attributes this to having switched between having an outside contractor make the first version, whereas this new one was built in-house.
The new look makes it simply to hop between comments, posts and pages. User Gravatars are now visible too.
(Credit: WordPress)
GooseGrade, the service that lets your blog readers correct any mistakes you've made, has a new plug-in for WordPress users that makes it easier for blog administrators to approve and implement corrections suggested by readers.
Once installed, corrections get sent directly to WordPress' dashboard, where administrators can then make a fix just like they would approve or deny a user comment. Because the plug-in is given privileges to write over your content, it then goes back into the post and makes the edit, without the administrator having to do it manually. Best of all, it shows you a before and after preview of what the correction would look like, so you can eyeball it without having to visit the post in full.
To aid in the correction process the plug-in supports multiple administrators, meaning a multi-author blog can decentralize who has to take a turn at the copy desk, and can pass off the responsibility if one of the members is out of the office. The plug-in also throws in a few nice tweaks like a complete history of suggested user corrections, and a summary of your blog's accuracy rating, which gets updated with each user-requested fix.
GooseGrade is working on a public API so others can come in to make similar tools, so expect to see similar plug-ins for other blogging platforms in the near future.
Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.
There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.
Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google's own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.
That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google's own service--but also to move off it.
Of course, you'll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.
Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.
Google added an import-export feature to Blogger in December. The company's "don't be evil" slogan got its start in a discussion about the company's commitment not to lock up people's data such as e-mail archives.
Web-based blogging tool WordPress.com is getting a big update in a few hours with the release of version 2.7. The update is going out to all WordPress.com users at 5 p.m. PST Thursday, with a release for self-hosted WordPress.org users to follow later this month. Brave beta testers who want to get an early jump on 2.7 early can install the latest release candidate which has been available since Monday.
(Credit:
Automattic)
Version 2.7 brings a host of changes, with the biggest one being a complete overhaul of the blogging tool's dashboard interface. Instead of having navigation elements on the top of the page, everything has now moved over to the left side of the screen, similar to most Web mail services.
As an added benefit, you're able to minimize the new menu bar completely, giving you the entire browser window to compose a post and tweak various options. When minimized you can still get at the features though, as hovering over the edge of the menu item will pop it out, letting you quickly change an option without bringing the bar back out.
Another noteworthy addition is "QuickPress," which lets you write and publish a new post right from the dashboard without having to enter the composition screen. It's a little reminiscent of FriendFeed and Facebook's latest publishing offerings in keeping things simple, with no text-formatting options, and simple buttons to add YouTube videos, photos, and videos.
Other improvements include a new automatic WordPress software updater for self-install users that will download and install the latest version with one click. Previously users had to install a special third-party plug-in that would do this for them. Users can also now change the color scheme of the administration pages, and upload media without having to create posts. A full list of changes can be found here.
(Credit:
Daniel Dura)
If you're keen on moderating blog comments in near real time and would prefer to do so without a browser window open, you should check out Moderator. It's a hybrid tool that uses both a WordPress plug-in and an Adobe AIR desktop application to keep you up to speed with the latest user chatter on your blog.
Once installed, you simply leave it running and it will update itself throughout the day, letting you approve or deny comments to go live. Because it sits on your desktop you can keep your blog comments lean and clean without ever having to visit the moderation page on your WordPress install, although creator Daniel Dura says you might run into some slowdown if you've got more than a few hundred comments awaiting moderation.
The tool, which was released earlier this week, is just an early version. Planned features for future releases include the option to reply right from the application, manage comments on multiple blogs, and get near real-time notifications when new comments come in.
[via RefreshingApps]
Automattic, parent company of blogging platform WordPress, has acquired IntenseDebate, the free blog comment enhancement tool. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
The service launched a little more than a year ago with several innovative features that effectively take over a blog's commenting system and add things like reputation, ranking, and a centralized area where blog administrators can manage comments across several sites at once.
Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says two of the main reasons for the pickup are IntenseDebate's e-mail replies and rating system which will likely make their way as the default offerings on WordPress.com and WordPress.org products in the near future.
For the time being, IntenseDebate has closed its doors to new users. In a post about the acquisition co-founder Jon Fox says it will be reopened to all as soon as it can prepare for a higher level of scaling. How big you ask? Like all of WordPress.org installs and WordPress.com, 4 million-plus users big.
The good news in all of this is that, according to Fox, IntenseDebate will remain a cross-platform product. From its very beginnings it has been open to other blogging tools like Blogger and MovableType. If anything, the closer integration with upcoming versions of WordPress should help accelerate development.
Andrew Mager posted an illustrated play-by-play of Saturday's WordCamp, a conference devoted to the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. According to Mager's report, the hosted version of WordPress has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts, and more than 6.5 billion page views.
(Credit:
Andrew Mager)
Of particular interest for the WordPress crowd is BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features, such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles, to the blogging platform. (WordPress competitor Six Apart also recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.)
BuddyPress is slated for 1.0 status in December 2008.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)As Mager reported, unlike the popular social networks, BuddyPress isn't a closed environment: "Why do we need another social network? BuddyPress is not another "data silo" like Facebook and MySpace. It's mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards."
Being more open isn't a necessarily going to move people out of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or other semi-permeable walled gardens. However, the combination of emerging open standards, such as OpenSocial, and the growing WordPress and Six Apart communities will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.
Just a week and a half ago WordPress for the iPhone was announced with a pretty killer screencast detailing what you could do with it. Tuesday morning it finally showed up on the app store (download it here), and I've had ample time to play with it. The good news is that it's very enjoyable to use and quite capable for creating posts on the go. The bad news? You've got to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to take advantage of it.
The key benefit to using this app is writing and publishing quick posts on the go. What I found after using it, though, is that it offers up far more to the discerning user who wants to use it as a very powerful publishing tool. You can upload photos either from your existing library or snap a quick shot with your phone's camera. I can see this leading to many food-related photo blogs. Also nice is that whatever you write can be saved on your phone, so you can work on dozens of posts at once and only publish when you want. There's also a great preview function that will show you what your post will look like without kicking you off to Safari.
I successfully connected two Wordpress.com hosted blogs to the app in just a minute or two, although I ran into problems connecting my personal hosted blog that uses the software install from WordPress.org. It's worth noting you'll need version 2.5.1 or higher to hook it up to a hosted blog, although updating to the recently released 2.6 is definitely worth it for all those extra publishing goodies.
Unfortunately there are some serious shortcomings to the iPhone that bring the app down a notch. If you're used to adding links to your posts there's not a lot you can do without copy and paste. HTML code is fully supported, so as long as you're good with your href tagging (which is brutal on the iPhone's built-in keyboard) you'll be able to add links from memory just fine.
Another quibble of mine is that drafts created on your computer won't show up in your post queue on the iPhone app, meaning you won't be able to start a post on your computer and finish it on the road. Ideally, future revisions will include better shortcuts for adding links and some support for fetching drafts from the cloud.
Hardcore users with a lot of readers will also be pining for some sort of comment management feature in future revisions. As it stands, you'll have to log in to your WordPress dashboard from Safari and administrate them from there, which isn't terrible, but it would be far more enjoyable to write and manage in one place.
All in all, it's off to a great start, and compared to competitor TypePad, which had its app available at the launch of the app store, WordPress is just as full featured and opens up mobile blogging to the millions of WordPress.com and WordPress.org users.
I've embedded screenshots and the screencast below.
Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It's the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.
The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This "turbo" mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, speeding up the page load when you're on a crummy connection.
Also introduced with the 2.6 update is revisioning, letting you go back to an older version of the blog post and either re-publish it over the newer one, or review the changes. This will be most helpful on multi-author blogs where you'll be able to track changes made by certain members of your blogging team with specific coloring based on author.
Another new feature that is long overdue is a built-in theme previewer, which will let you see a live preview of your blog using a selected theme. Previously you could only see what your existing content and widgets would look like with any theme by applying it over the one currently in use.
As part of the shift in blogging culture, there's also a new "press this" button, which is simply a bookmarklet for posting content from whatever page you're on straight to your WordPress blog. Similar bookmarklets from Facebook, FriendFeed, and Tumblr have proven to be an easy way to take whatever you're looking at and post it, even if the content author does not have a ShareThis, or similar sharing tool integrated into their content pages.
Users of previous versions of WordPress should definitely update to the latest stable release. As many users have discovered (myself included), some of the security holes that continue to be patched with each release can keep your blog from being overrun with spam.
When the iPhone App Store was mentioned in Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote, one of the many applications announced was a TypePad blogging tool, courtesy of Six Apart (The company also makes two other blogging tools; Movable Type and Vox). Now that the App Store has launched, other blogging platforms like WordPress are coming forward with their own iPhone app plans.
Today, WordPress put out a video demonstrating its very own iPhone blogging tool, which supports WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress.org blogs (as long as it's version 2.5.1 or later). WordPress promises the iPhone app will let you create and edit posts, will support multiple blogs as well as privacy settings, plus it will let you upload images directly from your camera or library. You can also preview the post in the iPhone's Safari browser before hitting Publish. While you can currently post to your WordPress blog via the Safari browser, this native iPhone app will hopefully offer a better and more seamless experience. It isn't out yet, but seeing as the App Store is live and the iPhone 3G will be in U.S. stores tomorrow, we expect it'll be out very soon. We expect to see a similar iPhone app from Blogger soon as well.
