Since the 3.0 update hit the iPhone in mid-June bringing copy and paste to the platform I’ve finally been able to use my phone as a standalone blogging platform rather than a useful tool for uploading drafts to be edited on a desktop later. The only problem was that the Wirdpress for iPhone app, a buggy an inconsistently reliable program to begin with, was completely broken by the 3.0 upgrade. The dev team promised that an update was on the way, but in the meantime I decided to try out one of the other options on offer at the iPhone app store.

Any Port in a Storm

I decided to go with Blogpress based on the mostly favorable reviews in the app store.  What I found was an excellent little blogging platform that was remarkably bug free with only a few functionality issues when compare to the Wordpress app. The first concern was stability.   The last two versions of the Wordpress app had a tendency to crash occasionally or, more often, eat posts. This never became an issue with Blogpress.

Trying Out the Basics

Logging in was as simple as typing in my username and password and Blogpress was ready to go. Wordpress mobile requires XML-RPC to be enabled from the web control panel before it can connect. I’m not sure if the same holds true for Blogpress since I already had the feature enabled, but it’s something to keep in mind when using the program for the first time. The app supports HTML formatting within posts, meaning that you’ll have to brush up if you’ve gotten used to the Wordpress text editor. One function that is conspicuously absent from Blogpress is the ability to create and edit Wordpress pages. How much that matters depends entirely on how you blog and if you use pages at all, but for me it is definitely a sorely missed feature.

Basic functions such as adding tags or categories to a post performed without any trouble in Blogpress. All is not perfect, however, in the tags and categories department. Blogpress lacks the functionality to add new categories directly from the app. This isn’t a deal-breaker as it is still possible to simply make new categories in Safari and then refresh the list in Blogpress, but it is a convenience that I missed after bein able to add categories within the Wordpress app, even if that action wa likely to cause Wordpress to crash or eat a post. The second issue I found was that tags tended to disappear if you added them to a post and then edited the categories for that post. This was another minor problem as it just meant adding the tags again, but it remains an annoyance regardless.

Issues and Bugs

The biggest non-bug related issue I found was how Blogpress handled image insertion. The program offers an intuitive interface for adding photos and specifying alignment and text wrapping, and the images upload into Wordpress with no issues. The problem is that any image uploaded from your phone is sent to a shared image database hosted by Blogpress rather than to your own webspace. They also provide an option to upload to a private Picasa album, but that still leaves images reliant on a third party provider. An option for uploading to a folder wherever the blog is hosted would be nice, but in the meantime I’ll rely on HTML and FTP On the Go for inserting images into a post.

One final minor issue involve post-dated posting. Blogpress dates all posts from the time you started drafting it rather than when you post it, an annoying “feature” that also shows up in the Wordpress mobile app. And for some reason setting a post for a later time or date on the phone results in the post being scheduled 4-5 hours before or after that scheduled time when it hits server side. I tried tinkering with time and date settings from my web control panel after finding nothing that controls time and date in the Blogpress controls, but this issue rests squarely with Blogpress as far as I can tell. So be warned that any posting will require some tinkering from the control panel before being published i you want to get the time and date correct.

Is it Worth $2.99?

Despite these issues, Blogpress does provide a stable and reliable alternative for Wordpress users. The program was refreshingly crash-free, and for now the bar set by the Wordpress mobile app has been so low that something as basic as stability is enough to set Blogpress apart for now. The real question is whether or not stability alone is worth the $2.99 pricetag considering all the other non-crash related issues that come bundled with Blogpress. When I first bought the app two weeks ago as the only iPhone blogging alternative while the Wordpress app was being updated for 3.0 I would have said it’s definitely worth the pocket change. Any port in a storm and all that. Now that Wordpress Mobile 3.0 is out and appears to be finally bring all the functionality of a mobile Wordpress control panel with stability for free I’m more inclined to say bloggers are better off stickin with the free app. Blogpress might still be a viable blogging option for the other blogging platforms it supports, but at the moment its an emergency backup at best for Wordpress bloggers.