Just a swipe of the finger to add pictures and videos to your blog posts.
Header

Using URL Schemes (Guest Author Explanation)

April 15th, 2013 | Posted by Lance in Guest Author | URL Schemes - (2 Comments)

This article is a guest post by Yannik Achternbosch, the editor of AppTestsss.de, a German blog about Apple, iPhone, iPad and Mac.

I saw on our twitter feed that Yannik had written up a very good post about how to use the URL schemes in Blogsy to make blogging even easier. And we love it when we see users write about how they do cool things with Blogsy so I wanted to share it with everyone on this blog. The only problem was that the article was in German. I tweeted to Yannik that I thought the post was very good and wished that it were in English so I could share it on our blog. A few days later I got the following post. Amazingly cool! Thanks Yannik!

Before I got my MacBook a couple of months ago nearly all of my articles for AppTestsss.de were written in Blogsy on the iPad. The app is nice and works well with my WordPress installation but with my MacBook I switched to MarsEdit and wrote only a few posts on my iPad. With version 4.2 Blogsy got many new features like a HTML keyboard and Markdown support but there is one new feature I’d like to highlight: URL schemes. With these schemes it’s possible to create a new article, to add content to the body and to open the website in the built-in browser.

Actions in Drafts

Creating a new article

The Blogsy URL syntax to create a new article with a defined body is the following: blogsy://post?entry=content_you_want. It would obviously be possible to use this scheme to create a new article in Safari by pasting in the content you would like to use into the url, but that is not how it is supposed to be used. So how should we use the scheme instead?

I assume you all have heard of the iOS app Drafts. The app supports some really cool actions that can be performed using URLs. To create such an action go to Settings > URL Actions > + but you don’t even have to create the Blogsy action on your own, you can simply click this link on an iPad with Blogsy and Drafts installed. The action will automatically be added to Drafts and can be used from the sharing menu.

Great, but what does this action do?

The action takes the text from Drafts, without the first line which I always use as a heading, and creates a new article in Blogsy with your text from Drafts as the content; and the best thing about that: You don’t have to write HTML in Drafts, you can use Markdown and Blogsy will parse it to HTML for you if you click the Markdown button after opening Blogsy.

That’s it. That’s the easiest way to create a blogpost in Blogsy from a text you wrote in Drafts. At the moment it is not possible to set the title or anything else using the URL schemes, you have to do that manually but I really hope this feature will be added in a future version.

Opening your current Safari webpage in Blogsy

Open in Blogsy

The second thing the Blogsy URL is able to handle are websites you want to open in the built-in browser. The URL syntax to do so is blogsy:URL. To open your current page in Blogsy you could simply type blogsy: in front of your URL in Safari but why should you do it the difficult way if you could do it much easier? Right, you shouldn’t. But what is the easier way? You just create a bookmark in Safari (the best place might be in your bookmark bar) with the following url: javascript:location.href='blogsy:'+location.href;. By clicking this bookmark blogsy: will be added in front of your current url which will open the page in the Blogsy browser.

To come to a conclusion: URL schemes in Blogsy are really great and have a huge potential together with other iOS apps but there’s also one thing I’m missing: The ability to add a title to an article using the scheme. I hope that this feature will be added in one of the next releases with even more improvements and maybe even some other things like the ability to choose the blog with a keyword in the URL (something like blogsy://post?blog=yourblog&content=something would be possible).

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Vote for us?

August 10th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Fomola | Fun | Promotion | Review - (0 Comments)

Last week I got an email from the people at Tap! The iPhone and iPad Magazine informing us that Blogsy was selected as one of the hundred best apps for iOS. This is a huge honor and we really appreciate it. But the purpose of this blog post is not to brag about Blogsy being selected.

The reason for this blog post is that they emailed me again this week saying that they are having a contest where people vote for one of these 100 best apps as “The Best App Ever.” No, we don't think that Blogsy is the best app ever. I'm not even sure what I think is the best app ever. But these kinds of contests help us get some exposure for Blogsy which can lead to increased sales which leads to us being able to continue to improve Blogsy.

So, if you have a few seconds it would be really cool if you could vote for us. If you click on the image below you will be taken to the voting page or you can click on this link.

Thank you very much.

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We chose Cerberus as the codename for Blogsy 4.1

August 9th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Features | Fun | Improve | Update | User Requests - (0 Comments)

Thank you to everyone that got involved in helping us come up with the codename for Blogsy 4.1. We were blown away by how many great names people suggested. It made it really tough to choose one. But as a bonus we now have a great list for future versions.

We decided to go with Cerberus because there are 3 of us developing Blogsy and the three heads fit with that.

Cerberus will bring a feature that users have been begging for since we first released Blogsy. We finally figured out a way to do it within the confines of the iOS SDK. And the second feature Cerberus will bring is something we think users will get a lot of use out of but I am sure many haven't even thought about having it integrated. I will give more details the closer Apple gets to approving Cerberus.

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Help with next version codename? What mythical character?

July 27th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Update - (14 Comments)

We are working on our next update which will bring a couple of features we think users will be very happy about. Don’t ask what they are. :D

But this blog post is to ask for input on the codename of our next version. Each version of Blogsy is codenamed with a mythical character. What do you think would be a good codename for our next version?

Here are the past versions.

Imp

Cyclops

Sasquatch

Phoenix

Minotaur

Centaur

Dragon

Medusa

 

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Want a tweet in your blog post?

July 16th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Fun | How-To | iPad | User Requests - (2 Comments)

I wrote a post a while ago about how to easily add a tweet to a blog post if you are a WordPress user. This easy insertion is possible because WordPress parses the URL and if it is a twitter URL it automatically creates the embedding. But I got a question on Facebook asking if it were possible to add a tweet to a post if you are a Blogger user.

The short answer is, YES. Matter of fact, you can do it for any of the blogging platforms. But unfortunately it is not as easy to do as it is with WordPress. The reason it is not as easy is that Twitter does not provide a way to grab the embed code if you are on a mobile device.

But it is possible and these are the steps to do it.

1) Open Blogsy's built-in browser and sign into your twitter account.

2) Once you are signed into your twitter account enter the following URL in the address bar and hit enter. http://mobile.twitter.com/settings/change_ui This will take you to the desktop view of your twitter account. I suggest you set this URL up as a bookmark in the Settings menu in Blogsy to make it easier in the future.

3) Find the tweet you want to add to your blog post then tap on it.

4) At the bottom of that tweet tap on “Details”

5) Now tap on “Embed this Tweet”

6) Now select all of the HTML embed code and copy it.

7) Flip to the HTML Side in Blogsy and paste that code where you want the tweet to appear in your post.

When you flip back to the Rich Side in Blogsy it will look like what you see in this image.

8) When you publish your post it will look like this.

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tweets in WordPress blog posts in Blogsy.

July 16th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | How-To - (10 Comments)

Do you like to add tweets to your blog posts? WordPress added the ability to simply paste the tweet link into your post and it will embed the tweet. Blogsy will do the same thing. Check out the steps below to see how to do it.

Official Twitter app method.

1) Open the Twitter app and tap on the tweet you want to use in your blog post.

2) Tap on the arrow out of the box in the top right corner.

3) Tap on “Copy link to Tweet”.

4) Go back to Blogsy and flip to the HTML Side. (We are not sure how the Twitter app is saving the URL but if you try to paste it on the Rich Side in Blogsy it will not paste. This is native iOS functionality so there is some issue with the web view and the way the Twitter app is saving the URL.)

5) Put the cursor on any new line and double tap to get the bubble to appear then tap paste.

6) In your post in Blogsy you will just see the twitter URL but when you post it to your blog it will get converted.

 
Tweetbot method.

1) Open the Tweetbot app and tap on the tweet you want to use in your blog post.

2) Tap on the “Share” button then tap on “Copy Link to Tweet”.

4) Go back to Blogsy and select a new line where you want the tweet to appear in your post. It has to be on a new line by itself. You can paste on either the Rich Side or HTML Side.

5) Now publish it and see the tweet in your post.

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The man, the artist, the Brad.

June 13th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Fun | Out in the Wild - (2 Comments)

Blogsy has some of the coolest users. And it has been so cool getting to know many of them.

Brad is one such Blogsy user. He first emailed me asking if Blogsy would support Squarespace. I told him that we were looking into adding it (expect it soon) and that was the beginning of our emails.

Brad started showing me some of the graphics he draws and they blew me away. I wish I had even a smidgen of the talent he has. I mentioned how cool I thought his stuff was and how amazing it was that he did it all on the iPad. And to my surprise he drew up some stuff about Blogsy.

Brad drew this for our current version of Blogsy – Dragon.

This is a schematics drawing of Blogsy he just got started with. I don’t know if he’s ever going to be able to finish it because it’s not easy to lay out all the features Blogsy has. But the start of it is amazingly cool so I wanted to put it here too.

And If you haven’t noticed already, the keys on the typewriter in our icon say, “Live Long and Prosper”. Yep, we are that geeky. Brad took this and made this cool Spock graphic.
This one doesn’t have anything to do with Blogsy but I thought it was so cool I decided to add it too.

Make sure you check out his other stuff on his site www.saysbrad.com and like his page on Facebook (Says-Brad).

Thanks for drawing these Brad! I can’t wait to see what amazing graphics you will come up with next.

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Embed a SoundCloud Player with Blogsy.

June 12th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | How-To | User Requests - (0 Comments)

Are you a SoundCloud user? Do you like to blog about SoundCloud tracks and add them to your blog posts? You can do this within Blogsy. I have to thank Carlo (a Blogsy and SoundCloud user) for sharing these steps with us.

1) Open Blogsy’s built-in browser and go to SoundCloud. If you do this often you may want to set up a bookmark in Blogsy’s built-in browser for SoundCloud.

2) Find the track you want to add to your blog post. Tap on the “Share” button in the top left corner of that track.

3) In the Share menu tap on “Edit your widget”.

4) In the “Edit your widget” menu long-press on the iFrame embed code so you get the popup menu. Tap on “Select All” then tap on “Copy”

5) Now flip to the HTML side in your post and put your cursor where you want the player to be in your post. Then paste that code you have copied.

6) Flip back to the Rich Side and you will see a thin grey line where the player will be in your post.

7) Publish your post and your embeded player for that track is in your post.

 

Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Blogsy Guys Podcast – Romantic Opinions – Episode 9

May 10th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Podcast - (0 Comments)

 

Topics

  1. Comments – We answer some comments people had about our last episode.
  2. Galaxy S III – The just released it. Do you want it?
  3. Better iPad editing – Wow, this is a very cool way to make editing on the iPad quicker and easier.

 

Apps

1) The Sims FreePlay – Peeing on the floor the doing some woohoo.
2) Pair – An app for the romantically inclined.
Share

,

The Blogsy Guys Podcast – Bitch and Moan (Episode 8)

April 30th, 2012 | Posted by Lance in Blogsy | Fun | Podcast - (0 Comments)

In this episode we get pretty opinionated.

 

 

Topics

  1. App Store Pricing – our thoughts on the price of apps and its effect on the future of the app world.
  2. iPhone 5s’ screen size – our thoughts on it and our thoughts on a small iPad

 Apps

1. Storify – The UI looks a lot like Blogsy. Does that annoy us?

 

 

 

2. Figure – Easy and fun rhythm.

Share

, ,