The Making of a Blog

Although I've had my website for a number of years, having designed and created it myself, I recently decided to add a couple of blogs. The main reason for this is to have a page that I can post to easily from my iPad and, if need be, my iPhone.

As I am a Gmail user, Google's Blogger was the platform I chose to use. Creating the blog account is simple and because I wanted a dark background, I started off with a template called "Travel". At first, I was able to use Blogger's Template Editor to customize the template, but subsequently, access to change things has gone awry (common, and apparently something to do with the Mobile template?!?).

I ended up carrying on the customization process by editing in the HTML editor. (Not too bad once you get your feet wet!) Once the page looked the way I wanted, with a background image, darker main backgrounds and larger fonts, I save it and then backup the XML file. Now, we're ready for posting.

Because I wanted the blogs to be used with mobile devices, I have only posted from my iPad. After doing some web research, I chose Blogsy as my blog editor.

This app is super at making post creation and management as simple as drag-and-drop, and with a built in browser, you can see exactly how the changes look live without having to leave the editor.

Because Blogsy only runs on the iPad, I did purchase BlogPress for the iPhone, but it is nowhere near as visual as Blogsy, so if I need to post images from my phone, I'll just continue to transfer them to the iPad using the PhotoTransfer app.

My own images are typically processed on my iMac and then synced to the iPad from iPhoto and Aperture. From Blogsy, I have direct access to them, and to any photos that I take and/or process directly on the iPhone or iPad.

I actually find it faster to create posts on my iPad than I do through Blogger's web interface.

Ain't technology great?