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.
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
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).
Posted with Blogsy
