BlogWriter Lite is a free app for the iPhone and iPod touch. BlogWriter is a free and easy to use app which is ideally suited for casual bloggers. Setting up a blog is easy and it comes with presets for blogger and wordpress.com blogs. Although not feature filled it gets the job done quickly and easily. Photographers will be disappointed to learn that it does not support sending images to your blog from your iPhone (the full version however can). It comes with a built in rss reader which you can use to subscribe to your favourite blogs. The only thing that I did not like about it was that you cannot turn your iPhone to the side to have the widescreen keyboard, this I feel is a serious design flaw as the app is intended for people who write a lot. Check out my post with it here.

I came across this website on my roamings for mobile blogging applications. moblog.net lets you take images with your camera phone and upload them straight to moblog as well as being able to do text-only blogging. These are my thoughts on it as they come:

Step 1: Create An Account
Creating an account was pretty painless, it asks for your mobile number, e-mail and desired username and password. It then asks what e-mail address you would like to send new blog posts to. When you have finished the process it gives you the e-mail you chose earlier as well as a phone number to send texts and mms (how do you write that in plural?) to. Go to my profile here.

Step 2: Moblogging
There are 3 ways to submit to moblog. The first one i will be trying is via mms. I took a picture of my cat on my phone and sent it in mms with the caption “this is my cat” to moblog. I tried 3 times and it came back “unknown recipient” each time. It turned out to be my fault, I had put in the number wrong :s. I tried again with the updated number. Here are the results. I checked my profile as soon as i had sent it and it was up within 5 seconds. The only thing I dont’t like about it is the “…” as the title. I can’t find a way of changing that when sending via mms.

The second way of submitting is with e-mail. Using an image I made earlier I sent an e-mail to the special e-mail they gave me. I attached the image and put in some body text and a subject. Once sent I expected the post times to be quicker than by mms. How wrong could I be. It never actually posted. I tried it through my computer for the same effect.

Not put off by the failure of e-mail i tried the third option. By pointing my phone at m.moblog.net/add/. Being out of 3G signal I decided to send only a text message. It may have been my phone but everytime I logged in it would redirect me to the homepage and as soon as I went anywhere else it would log me out. Overall I managed to get 1 out of 3 methods to work.

Step 3: Customization
Customizing your moblog seems to be very limited. There are many different themes you can use but they offer no customization except for changing some about you text. As a moblog subscriber you can change the css which would be great, if I was willing to pay £5 a month for a service that mostly does not work. Go to my profile here to see one of the themes.

Conclusion
Usability: 4/10
Customization: 3/10
Features: 6/10

Overall: 2/5

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

MobilePress is frankly awesome, it turns your wordpress blog into a moblog quickly and easily. Is this enough for the amazing team at MobilePress? Nope, they also let you create custom themes for mobile users. They then let you set themes for different handsets and browsers. For example; you use the iPhone and you go to your blog and see a nice iPhone style list which fits in perfectly with the iPhone software, your friend then goes to your blog on his Motorola N95 and sees a different theme that fits well with the native browser. It is this functionality that many users could not live without.

MobilePress also SEOs your blog. When the Google or [insert inferior search engine here] mobile bot crawls your site it will see the mobile version, this gives you a better score on Google making your site come up higher on Google Mobile searches.

Check out MobilePress on wordpress.org here.