Bloggers, would you like to post on the go? With Blogsy by Fomola, you can turn your iPad into an easy blogging tool. Although you can’t do everything that the desktop platform allows you to, you can most definitely make complete posts, and either save them as drafts or publish them.

Review
Blogsy allows you to access your WordPress or Blogger site to make posts. Before you can use the app, however, you have to make sure the XML-RPC remote publishing protocol is activated on your site. This means you’ll need administrator access, or request your site’s administrator to handle this for you. For WordPress, you’ll have to go to the Writing section under Settings and look down at Remote Publishing. Make sure the XML-RPC box is checked. Otherwise, Blogsy will give you an error message when you attempt to add your account.

One of the first things I found out when trying Blogsy is that it doesn’t let you write or edit pages, only posts. It also follows that you won’t be able to edit your CSS or template files or manage your plugins. Since I had just started setting up my personal site, such more advanced features would indeed have been useful. But one can’t have everything. Blogsy does what it does pretty well.

When using Blogsy, you can drag photos and Youtube videos from a media sidebar into your post. At the moment, images can only be added from Flickr and Picasa, as well as through a Google image search or off the web via the built-in browser. The browser is pretty basic, but it serves its purpose. In future updates, I would hope to see the addition of bookmarking capability. If it could import Safari bookmarks, that would be yet better. When using the browser, it seemed to offer the feature of grabbing the site link. However, when I held down on the button to the left of the address bar and dragged what was named a “link” over to my post, nothing was embedded. The link was not even copied into the clipboard. I tried this with more than one site but to no avail. I did wait till the site had finished loading, so I have no idea what might have gone wrong. Hopefully, if this is a bug, it will be fixed soon enough.

With Blogsy, you can create and select categories and tags. You can also control the visibility of your post (private or public), allow or disallow comments, save drafts, and publish or schedule your posts. Posts may be styled using simple menu buttons or you can type code too. When dealing with images, you can either work on “rich mode” (a visual format), or use the “write side” (html view). Despite a few flaws, such as in the browser, Blogsy is an incredibly handy app for bloggers.

*Update: The developer has responded regarding the creation of web links. You have to first highlight the text in your post, select it as a link, then open the browser to drag the site address onto your text link. I tried it and it works. However, I think the process could be made more intuitive and versatile. Dragging a link like I originally attempted should open the link creation box and allow you to type in the text for that link, or at least copy the link to the clipboard.

Tips
If you have installed WordPress on a separate directory and not your root directory, you must enter the full address when adding your account. For instance, my personal site can be accessed on the web at http://gwenphua.com. However, I installed WordPress on another directory named “wp” so that I could keep my root directory neat. To add my account in Blogsy, I had to type: “http://gwenphua.com/wp/”.

For in-depth instructions, you should visit the developer’s site.

Recommendation
Blogsy is well recommended to all avid bloggers who own iPads. It will not let you edit your pages or tweak any code in your theme files, however, it is more than adequate for routine posting. Blogsy is an excellent deal at $2.99 in the App Store.

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Note: A promotional code was provided by the creator for use in this article.

Please post your comments, tips, and your own reviews below in the comments area!

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