Blogging from an iPad: A Beginner's Guide!

Soooo, my loved ones were extremely generous on my birthday this year and clubbed together to get me an iPad 3! I am IN LOVE with it. Whether or not I'd be able to blog effectively from it was a really big factor in me deciding to get an iPad, and articles online made it sound like it was not easy. But (with the help of recommendations from Twitter peeps) I have found a few things that have made blogging super easy and enjoyable from the iPad!

I'll show you my 'kit' first, then move onto a review of Blogsy, an amazing blogging app.

First up is this incredible invention which I had no idea existed until Alex stumbled upon it on eBay (and will silence iPad naysayers that whine about the lack of USB ports...). It's a 5 in 1 connection kit which you can put USB leads/sticks and also camera memory cards into! It only cost £2.29 and will be perfect for blogging on the go, as I can take it on the train with me and take my camera pics directly off it.

Next up, the case. @Little_Nells recommended this one to me on Twitter. It's £14.99 down from £50 and is apparently a dupe of Apple's own cases. It's super streamlined and the top can be folded in different ways to make a stand (great for watching movies or blogging, depending on which way round you stand it!)

(This angle is great for blogging on a surface, which I will be in the train!)

Onto Blogsy! Their how-to vids will go into more detail about this £2.99 app than I could possibly blog, so they are well worth a watch if you're interested in the app. It's basically a publishing application that lets you compose blog posts for Wordpress, Blogger and Tumblr. It has all the usual formatting options, but has incredible icons down the side of the publishing interface which let you open Safari/Picasa/Flickr/YouTube/your Photostream and drag and drop images straight into the blog post! The ability to browse Safari in-app is so useful for adding hyperlinks into posts as I have in this (this post has been created entirely with Blogsy!)

One hiccup I did have was that some images I was dragging and dropping from my Photostream were low res, but brainiac @TheSammersaurus told me that all you need to do is switch the HTML screen and change the 's500' towards the end if the image code to 's800' or 's1024' (which I use). A bit of a faff but in the grand scheme of how mind-blowingly awesome this app is, it's something I can live with. @BlogsyApp saw me discussing this problem on Twitter and have asked me to email them about it, so I shall and hopefully it will be fixed in an update some time! They are really sweet on Twitter and always reply to tweets and thank people praising this app. It deserves praise as it puts Blogger's own app to shame!

Here's how it looks:

I didn't want to bombard you guys with an actual tutorial as it's a bit of a niche topic, but do feel free to ask any questions in the comments and I'll reply to them!

Ooh, a note about the iPad itself: Alex bought it on the university Apple store, which meant he got 3% discount (oh Apple, u so generous) and it has 1 year's free Apple Care! If you're a student (or are shacked up with one like moi!) you must take advantage of this cheeky discount!

Oh, and as I have a 3G version to use on the go, I researched and found GiffGaff (owned by O2) to be the cheapest pay as you go data providers. They sell 'gigabags' of data for as little as £5 a month and there's no contract. I have only just signed up so can't properly review it, but it was certainly the best deal I could find! Time will tell whether I bought the right amount of data to cope with lots of blog viewing...

So that's a little insight into my iPad/blogging set up! I hope I haven't bored the tits of those of you that just come around here to see my outfit pics!

Have you thought abut buying an iPad? If you already have one, do you have any iPad tips to share with a new iPad mum?

xo