Christine Chan

Technology, Geek, and More

Blogsy: The Blogging App For Your iPad

with one comment

Yellow Flower

Let’s face it, the iPad is a great device. It allows us to consume plenty of media, but the best thing is that it can also be used as a serious tool for creating content. And by creating content, in this case, I mean blogging.

But since the introduction of the iPad a year ago, there haven’t been many blogging apps for the iPad. Because of this, the iPad as a blogging tool was kind of hindered, unless you had a Squarespace site (their app is beautiful). The WordPress app wasn’t too great, and there were plenty of other crappy blogging apps in the market. None of them would suffice for the serious blogger.

But then Blogsy made its debut in the App Store. And now the iPad can really be a serious blogging tool.

Blogsy allows you to currently connect with two blogging platforms: Blogger and WordPress. Additionally, you can also log in with your credentials for Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube. There are plans to add more blogging platforms in the future, but for now, it’s just Blogger and WordPress. However, if you have a self-hosted WordPress site, you can also use that as well! So there’s a good chance that you’re covered in the services that Blogsy currently provides.

Bloggers will be pleased to know that Blogsy has two modes when writing or editing a new post: Rich and Write side. The Rich side is where you can pull media from Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Google Image Search, or Safari (in-app browser) and drag it into your post. Tapping on the media element will give you some options, such as Alt Text/Title, Alignment, Location, Size, and Link Properties. These can all be adjusted to your liking. It adds a sense of control and customization to the media elements in your blog posts, which is amazing. You can also drag and drop a URL that will create a hyperlink instantly, without any coding involved.

Now, you’ll probably wonder why you can’t write anything on the Rich Side, and how you would go about with writing the actual blog post. It took me a while to figure out, but then I felt kind of dumb when I realized that you simply have to swipe the screen to access Write Side.

The Write Side is pretty much like the HTML view in Blogsy, where you’ll be able to write freely and view media elements in their HTML forms. Additionally, you can bold or italicize your text, and even strikethrough too! That’s not all – there are several different format options if you want a

large heading

or a

small heading

and other

fun stuff like this.

You can also have

  • bulleted lists like this
    • and this

Or even

  1. numbered lists like this
  2. and this!

There are also the three different alignments, left, right, and centered. Block quotes and breaks can be inserted too.Ok, I’ll stop showing off the different text formats that Blogsy can do, because I just created a rather large mess, didn’t I?When you create your blog post, you can also tap the icon with the gear and pencil to access the different settings of your blog post. These settings include the Title, Publish Date, Categories, Tags, Comments, Status, Visibility, and Blog Select (if you have multiple blogs set up, this is very useful).

You can also switch between the current post settings or jump back to a local draft or edit published posts or drafts. A post becomes a local draft if you are creating a post but then decide to start a new one. The one you were just working on becomes saved in the local drafts of the app, but will not appear as a draft on your WordPress or Blogger admin panel. If you want a draft to appear online on the admin panel, you’ll have to make sure that you select the Draft option under the Status option. You can also schedule a post to go up later or posts that are pending-review, all from within the app.

Blogsy is a very fully featured blogging app. I have composed this entire post from the app, with help from my first gen iPad Keyboard Dock.

However, in the 1.0 version, you cannot upload media from your device library. Because of this, the introductory price for Blogsy is $2.99, but the price will go up with the next update, which brings in full uploading support.

If you’re a blogger with an iPad, then I would highly recommend picking up Blogsy. It finally makes your iPad a worthy blogging tool.

Advertisement

Written by Christine Chan

April 17, 2011 at 2:31 pm

Posted in iPad

Tagged with , , , ,

One Response

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. Hello, I am Lance, one of the guys behind Blogsy.

    Thank you for writing about Blogsy. We will continue to improve Blogsy so hopefully it will one day satisfy 99.9% of the bloggers out there.

    If you want to vote for what you would like to see added to Blogsy after we have uploading done you can go here – http://www.blogsyapp.com/about

    A lot of users have told us that our how-to videos really helped them get the most out of Blogsy. The videos can be found here – http://www.blogsyapp.com/how-to

    Cheers,
    Lance

    Lance Barton

    April 20, 2011 at 3:36 pm


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.