My name is Kevin Moor. I started to write back in the days when I had to go to college. Since then, I realized that Internet marketing is my calling. My interest turned into a profession, so now you can read my articles.

*UPDATE*

WordPress has recently updated this app a few times, bringing a few new features but mostly fixing a lot of the problems this app use to have. There are now less crashes and less problems in general, and fewer issues of the app mangling my posts. I am now upgrading this app from a 2 star to a 3 star because they have definitely improved the app. At this point it is much less of a headache, they’ve add in a few things like the resizing of photos can be a specific size if you always use that size and adding images puts them at the top of the list instead of the bottom. The app still is not perfect, infact my update that I tried to post to this post from the app failed.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog and an iPad, you have undoubtedly searched for a way to easily update and maintain your blog from your iPad. You can of course just use the website admin, but that isn’t the best environment for an iPad and can be a bit tedious. I looked around at several apps but I did not purchase any. I really didn’t see the need to purchase an app for this with so many free apps out there. So I tried a few different free options and finally settled on the WordPress app (made by WordPress). Each of the apps I looked into had fairly negative reviews including this app. While I agree with a lot of the reviews that this app definitely has a long way to go, it does do the job that I am looking for, with a little help. This is a universal app and functions virtually identical on both the iPhone and iPad and while I would never write a review ON my iPhone, I will use it as a means of uploading screen-shots from my iPhone to my WordPress blog or administering comments (rejecting/accepting/etc.).

This app definitely has a lot of flaws and problems, but I find as long as I do not attempt to write the blog post within the app itself then I am usually able to do pretty well. Some of the problems I have had with this app are things like: when I am editing a blog post sometimes it will overwrite another, uploading images will sometimes upload one about 10 – 20 times along with all the others (not sure why it does this), editing a post can cause the page to jump around a lot. But all in all if I write the blog post in Textastic, edit the screen-shots and then go into WordPress, create a new blog post, paste in the text of the post, and then upload the images, I am usually pretty good. I can then go into the web admin to handle any remaining issues such as verifying that it looks correct through preview and updating the date of the post and even publishing it (although you can publish it and update the date right from the app). As long as I am careful, everything functions exactly as I need it to and nothing goes wrong. I think I have the rhythm down now although it took sometime to get to that point. I think there is a lot they could do to improve this app and until they do, I cannot give it higher than 2 stars. BUT I will say this, in the meantime, I do not feel compelled to purchase another app.

FEATURES:

• Create a new post or view/edit an existing post. (Although editing an existing post has sometimes had sporadic results for me.)
• Create a new page or view/edit an existing page, works very similar to editing a post.
• View all comments you have received, mark it as spam, reject it, delete it or accept it.
• Upload images or videos right through the app directly to your blog.
• Insert images into a blog post from your media library.
• Give your blog post a Title, Tags and Categories.
• Update the status of your post from Local Draft to Draft or to Published.
• One click publish your post.
• Local Drafts save the post right on your iPad (or iPhone) until you are ready to push it to your blog.
• Manage multiple blogs, self hosted or on wordpress.org.

The app does the necessary tasks even if it has a bunch of bugs, I do use it daily to work on this blog. It isn’t the best environment and I truly hope they improve this app, but since it is free, it is the winner for me (for now). I will update this post with either a higher star rating (if they improve it) or a suggestion for another app should I find a better one. BTW I also use a plugin for my blog which runs on a 5 minute crontab uploading all my images to Amazon S3. That works seamlessly with this process as this app uploads the files to my Blogs server, and then the crontab handles putting them on S3 after the blog is published. Do you have an app you use for updating your blog? If so, please let me know.

* NOTE: There was an update to this app posted to the app store the night of 12/20/2010 that listed a ton of bug fixes and fixes of crashes. Although it didn’t list any of the bugs I have mentioned in this review, that fix improves the overall stability. I will continue to use the app for now and report back if I see a significant improvement.