Blogging has always belonged to the land of desktops and laptops, but blogging from your iPad is getting easier all the time thanks to some smart, stylish apps. Here are the five best iPad apps we’ve found for blogging.
1. Posts
Posts app
Works with: WordPress, Blogger
Price: Used to be $9.99, but now it’s free!
Simply put, Posts is the best blogging client for iPad. It’s got the kind of slick interface that Apple itself could have made, its lovely design features thumbnails to make managing your blog more visual, it offers both WYSIWYG and HTML editing, and you can even use it to manage multiple blogs. You can moderate comments from right inside the app, and there’s a robust offline blogging mode, too. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more full-featured, easy-to-use, beautiful blogging app anywhere. I wouldn’t mind seeing support for more blogging software, but for what you get, at zero cost… Posts can’t be beat.
2. Blogsy
Blogsy app
Works with: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, SquareSpace, MetaWeblog, IBM Connections
Price: $4.99
The best thing about Blogsy is that it’s creators are updating it and adding new features constantly. One of the very first iPad blogging clients to be made available, I checked Blogsy out a few years ago and wasn’t very impressed. But thanks to the developer’s commitment to never stop improving it, it’s become a real powerhouse of productivity. It interacts seamlessly with your most-used social networking services like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and more (but strangely, no Twitter). And did you see that list of blog software it’s compatible with?
3. Poster
Poster app
Works with: WordPress
Price: $2.99
Poster is iPad blogging done right. It has a clean, minimal interface, and it has all kinds of bells and whistles that Apple fans will love. At first glance, Poster looks like a “quick and simple” blog editor, but don’t underestimate it. It can manage up to nine different blogs, it smartly integrates with Dropbox, it supports multiple languages, and it lets you create articles with custom post types. Perhaps Poster‘s real specialty is allowing you to create new blog posts using selected text, images, and more from other apps. Virtually anywhere you see a picture, you can select it and switch to Poster to create a post about it. See a quote you like in Mail or Safari? Copy it and open Poster, and you’ll have yourself a new post with that text. Poster is power and beauty in one package.
4. Prose
Prose app
Works with: WordPress, Blogger
Price: $2.99
Another in the vein of Posts (see #1), Prose is a utilitarian blog editor that gets the job done but doesn’t do anything terribly unique. Still, iTunes users have almost unanimously positive things to say about it. You can edit in WYSIWYG or HTML modes, manage multiple blogs, it has an offline mode, and plays nice with your social networks. One nice feature is how it creates neat visual thumbnail previews of your posts and media.
5. BlogPress
BlogPress app
Works with: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, MovableType, TypePad, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Joomla, Drupal, SquareSpace
Price: $2.99
It may not be much to look at, but BlogPress has a lot to offer under the hood. It handles all the usual stuff like text, photos, and vids with ease, but it also offers some thoughtful extra features that you might not find elsewhere. It can automatically generate geo-location tags and maps, for example, and it supports the MetaWeblog API. On the other hand… It always gives me a little pause when an app’s description or website is filled with typos and bad grammar; it usually means that either the app is a quick hack job, or that the developer is so focused on programming that small, user-friendly details get overlooked. I fear the latter could be the case with BlogPress, but it’s still one to keep an eye on thanks to all its powerful options.
Also worth noting: all of the major blogging platforms have their own proprietary apps, many of which are quite good. They include WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, Xanga, and more.
About the Author
Benjamin Weeks is an Internet entrepreneur and freelance blogger with discerning tastes. He prefers to wear Izod, he gets his 4G access through Clear Internet Deals, and he cried the day that Saturn cars went out of business.
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It would be nice if some of these were available to Canadians.
Very useful tips and info. If I start a blog using these apps on a iPad can I eventually switch to using a mac computer or will there be some difficulty? Thanks for sharing!