Yesterday’s blog post I wrote on my phone.
I didn’t plan that. It’s just how it happened.
I knew what I wanted to blog about yesterday morning — a vacation in March, to see the Lewis chessmen in New York — and on the subway train I pulled out my notepad and started writing down what the blog post would be so I could type it up quickly when I reached the office. Some of my favorite blog posts in years past, like this one from a year ago, were written that way.
Then it occurred to me.
I have the WordPress for Android app on my phone.
I’d downloaded the app when I bought my phone, and after writing a single post with it (specifically, this post on health care reform) I decided that I was never doing that again. It was clunky and it was slow and I didn’t enjoy the process at all. And even though the app has been updated over the past year, with a complete and total overhaul, I hadn’t tried it since.
First time for everything.
I opened up the app, started up a new post, and started keying in what I’d written out longhand, which wasn’t much, just paragraphs one, two, and four. I embellished what I’d written out here and there as I “typed” it, and when the subway leg of my journey came to an end I had all three paragraphs entered. As I waited for the light rail at the stop across the street, I keyed in the rest without anything written down to guide me, and when the light rail train arrived I was done.
I saved it as a draft, I didn’t publish it. I wanted to add some hyperlinks, and I wanted to add some artwork, and neither of those were feasible with the app. Still, that only took ten minutes once I reached the office, and then the post was ready to go.
Is it possible that I’ll work this way in the future? Write something on the phone, even if only as a prototype post, and then revise and publish on the blog? Quite possibly. The app worked fairly well, I was able to get the text entered without much difficulty, and setting things like tags and categories was easily done.
Plus, I love to tinker, and tinkering with the app is something I’ll definitively do. 🙂