Tag: WordPress

Automattic killed Poster

My current workflow for publishing to my blog involves the distraction free Markdown text editor Byword to quickly get my thoughts down (Markdown syntax). Then I copy my text into either MarsEdit on my iMac
or Poster on my iPad. I have Byword on my iMac, iPad and iPhone and app syncs my content across devices using iCloud. I can work from any device.

Once I complete writing post I copy/paste into MarsEdit on the iMac or Poster on iOS. It’s a workflow that worked well for me until just now. But I recently learned that Poster was acquired by Automattic last year. Mostly Automattic will fold Poster’s features into the WordPress for iOS app.

Bummer! I also found a problem with the way Poster handles images on iOS and I was hoping to report to the developer. I use a WordPress plug-in to display EXIF data below the images on my blog. The app removes all EXIF data from images when uploading to WordPress. Many of the images posts I’ve created on iPad using Poster don’t display any EXIF information. I may have to go back and edit the last few weeks of blog posts.

I can publish plain text content directly from Byword on iOS so Poster is somewhat superfluous. If Poster isn’t going to be updated to fix this issue then I can no longer use it. I only used Poster because it could handle images, supported Markdown, and unlike Byword, I can edit my posts. Byword can publish to WordPress but can't edit existing posts.

In the interim I will try using the WordPress iOS app.

Pressgram plugins for WordPress

Last year I dumped Instagram and started using Pressgram to publish and share my "in-the-moment" images to Twitter, Facebook and this WordPress blog. I love the feeling that comes from knowing that I have control over how my images are published and licensed. In the past I had to use a WordPress plugin to copy back my Instagram photos my blog. The plug-in worked fine but the quality of the images was terrible. I'm enjoying the quality and ease of using Pressgram to post images to my blog.

While no plug-in is needed to post images from Pressgram to WordPress, developer Joshua Vandercar has written a plug-in that allows a lot of flexibility in how images are posted and presented. The original Pressgram plug-in didn't have these features so Joshua wrote his own. However, the Pressgram team contacted Joshua and they decided to combine efforts. The result is one incredible plug-in for instantly publishing iPhone images to WordPress.

You can install the plug-in directly within the WordPress administrator Plugins panel or download from the WordPress.org site an install manually.

WordPress_Settings_Media

Once installed you can find settings for the Pressgram plug-in under Settings->Media in the WordPress administrator interface. There are a lot of options here so let me walk you through them.

WordPress_Pressgram_Settings

The first thing I did was assign a category for my Pressgram posts. I chose to create a new category called Pressgram but I could have chosen an existing category. I chose a new category so that I could have a category page for my Pressgram posts instead of having my images show up on the home page of my web site. I also opted to have the images show up in my RSS feed.

Once I had a category defined I made some selections to fine tune how images are posted to my blog. I wanted my Pressgram images to be posted immediately as part of a blog post and I wanted the post format to be Image and the image to be centered on the post. Whatever I type into the text box in the Pressgram app -- including hash tags -- will show up in my blog post but I wanted to convert the hash tags to post tags and have them removed from the body of my post.

In the layout section I opted to have my images displayed in two columns across the category page with no more than 10 images per page.

There are a number of other options but I have not used them. You can read more about these on the Pressgram plugin page. As I said before. The Pressgram plugin isn't required to post images from the Pressgram app to your WordPress blog. However, I think the plugin provides more power and flexibility in customizing your blog to maximize your use of Pressgram.

WordPress_Pressgram_Page