“You should get back to blogging.” Heard that many times. I love blogging. I miss blogging.

One of the many reasons I let this blog get stale was the amount of time I now spend on iOS. I have a computer in the basement for work. Other than that, I’m on an iPhone or iPad and I blog best first thing in the morning. Even though I use an external keyboard with my iPad, when the urge hits to share something with the world it was easier to click a button and compose a simple tweet or Facebook update.

Mobile Safari and the WordPress browser editor are not a good combination. Painful. I tried blogging a few times from the official WordPress app but it’s terrible too. It’s fine for moderating comments, frustrating for composing complete posts.

Late last week, I found Poster. It’s a universal app for $3.99 and if you still believe in blogging, it’s worth every cent. I don’t know which impresses me more, that it’s so good and beautiful or that it was developed by a college kid who did it while teaching himself how to code for iOS.

Here’s why it rocks:

• Markdown. Instead of a lame attempt at a formatting bar like the WordPress app, you just use Markdown syntax. It’s easy. For example, instead of futzing with highlighting over text and then hitting a button to make the selected text bold, you just put ** before and after the text you want to make bold. Like this. There’s a preference in Poster which converts the Markdown shorthand to HTML before it hits WordPress. I like that.
• Open in… support. You can start new posts from other apps, or import from Dropbox.
• Image support. Very easy to insert from a URL using Markdown or within the app:
  
  In a future version, it would be nice if we could browse our WordPress image directory as well. I’d also love to be able to browse existing tags. But those are minor nitpicks.

Maybe this is enough to help me get my blogging mojo back. Using Poster on my iPad, I wrote and scheduled a 1000+ word post that will publish tomorrow on ::cough cough:: other stuff going on. Still have so much I can be writing about. Last week I wrote my very first Salesforce Flow. And Winter ’13 is coming…some good things to chat about there too. I did my best blogging when I was a full time freelancer and that’s exactly what I am again, so we’ll see.