As someone who has worked as a web developer, I know how time consuming creating and maintaining a web site can be. Which is why WordPress is such a godsend for bloggers. It handles so much of the fiddly, technical stuff without fuss and leaves you free to concentrate on what you want to say.
There is only one thing I really don’t like about WordPress. That is the post editor. I don’t like writing in a web browser at all. I use Scrivener for most of my writing, including blog posts. When I am ready to post I copy the whole article and paste it into the WordPress editor, make any necessary formatting tweaks, and then publish. What I would really like is to have an option to publish directly from within Scrivener, but that is not likely to happen any time soon.
Though the current situation is not ideal, I am used to it and I can work with it. However, change is on the way. WordPress will soon be rolling out their new super-duper post editor, Gutenberg. Great! Except, it isn’t. I don’t like it. At all. They have gone down the desktop publishing route. This means that everything is split up into movable blocks of content – paragraphs, images, headings, etc. It is focussing on page layout instead of content. Hang on a minute! Isn’t that what style sheets are meant to be all about? Absolutely. That aspect of WordPress wasn’t broken. You choose a theme and your documents are formatted for you. All you need to worry about is the simple stuff like headings. It works well. So why fix it?
Gutenberg wants me to paste my content paragraph by paragraph, creating a new block for each one. With a long post that is time consuming and simply silly. It makes it more compelling to write your article directly in Gutenberg, but I don’t want to write that way. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Which is where Byword comes in. Byword is a neat and simple text editor for iPad. It is one of a plethora of text editing apps that I tried when I was looking for a way of integrating writing on the iPad with Scrivener on the desktop. The need for this became redundant when Scrivener for iPad was released and I hadn’t thought about Byword for some time. But then I remembered a secret little function it had hidden away from view – it has the ability to publish a document directly to your WordPress site! Exactly the feature I would like to see added to Scrivener. It gives me a new option. I can use my iPad to write blog posts and publish them. I don’t need to go within a country mile of Gutenberg after all!
That is the theory, anyway. It remains to be seen how well it works. I suspect adding images to my posts might not be as straightforward as I’d like. That is something I’ll have to play around with. Right now, I’m just happy to have found an alternative option. This is my first post written entirely on an iPad and uploaded to my site with it. And if you are reading this then that is proof that blogging by iPad works!