I can’t believe how easy it is to use WordPress with an iPhone, to upload pictures and maintain a blog.

The one thing I hadn’t done with my iPhone was upload pictures when I’m out. I’d been manually uploading them to my laptop first, and adding them to applications later.

There are actually a few platforms I need to do it on – Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter – and I hadn’t played with photos on any of them, mostly because I hadn’t had time to research how it used up bandwidth.

But I’ve come nowhere near using up mymonthly bandwidth, so it was time to play.

I created a new blog for free, at wordpress.com.

I already had the free WordPress for iPhone application on my phone.

I setup the username and password for my new blog, on my phone.

Took a quick photo of the flowers in my garden.

Went to WordPress on the phone. Logged in. Selected Photo. And the application asked me which photo I’d like to upload. Added a comment. Clicked save.

And voila. A photo and accompanying text uploaded with no hassle to my blog.

Beautiful.

And the blog was free.

It’s a bad first photo, because it was evening and you could barely see the flowers.  But check it out at Flowers Australia.

Geez  it’s a pleasure with the one-click upgrade available at WordPress.

Both the core, and plugins now have one-click upgrades available. I’ve done plugins in the past, but this is the first time I’ve upgraded the core (to version 2.7.1).

No need to download, unzip, upload and run the upgrade.php. It just works.

If only Drupal, PHPFox and x-cart ran this smoothly.

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7 tonight.
Partly because I also needed to upgrade the blog at work, and I like trialling things on my sites first.

As usual, backed up production database through cpanel’s phpmyadmin export function.
Tested the upgrade on a localhost copy of my site.
Tested the automatic plugin upgrade in testing. That was sweet – no more downloading each plugin, unzipping, copying and testing. They all worked first time.

Then ran the upgrade in production. It worked first time. Beautiful. Even ran the automatic plugin upgrades in production as well. This saves sooo much time.

Checked if there were any new WordPress plugins I should be using The best source for this was Graywolf’s http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress-part-ii/. Decided to grab the twitter and feedburner plugins – I’m happy with All-in-one-SEO and the others I use.

But the twitter plugin didn’t authorise for me. Oh well. Check again in a few days, then I’ll delete it if it still doesn’t work. I didn’t use the twitter widget – I like using the fancy graphics for titles, and avoiding the widgets gives me more control. Most widgets can be done with tags, alternatively.

Did some maintenance on other parts of the site. Drop-down archives menu. Relocated link menu. Made the title clickable (well overdue).

Decided to make my RSS feeds through Feedburner. Interesting that I rebuilt my feedburner link, and it’s not the nice url address I used to have. But it has so many nice features. Google’s ownership of Feedburner must have helped development speed. And decided to make my RSS feeds full instead of partial – I’ve discovered how annoying it is to only read an excerpt of a blog post, when you are trying to keep up by mobile phone. Googled “full rss feed vs partial” and found that most people share my view.

Really enjoying the new WordPress admin layout. I thought the last one was very poorly thought out, in terms of writing a post vs page, and having to page down to find the categories for a post. Apparently there is a plugin to rearrange the menu from side to top, but I’m pretty happy.

And now it’s time for Friday night PIZZA!!!!

I finally upgraded this blog to version 2.5.1, from 2.1.2. So there was a database upgrade, introduction of draggable widgets, and a few other things.

I also changed hosts, moving from a Canadian company to an Aussie host. Rather than get the new host to copy from the old one, I did it myself, unloading the database, copying the code, and reloading the database, and changing the domain delegation. Amazingly it worked first time. I let the host change settle in for a few days, before doing the WP upgrade.

I didn’t widgetise my template. To do that, I probably would have had to override too many sidebar headings, or learn how to use SIFR, so I avoided the fuss. Although we did widgetise the old template used for the blog at work, the other week.

The main reason to widgetise, IMHO, is to easily take advantage of new widgets. Duh. It just avoids having to add specific new code for things like the tag cloud, search box, calendar, and the piece e resistance, the text box. I like the fact that you can have an admin-driven text box added to your sidebar. It’s useful for making announcements, or other generic text.

My template, which is really really old, was a bit butchered. It was my first piece of PHP modification, and it still doesn’t have a link back to the home page if you click on the logo. And I can’t remember what font I used in the sidebar, so the Tag heading doesn’t match the others. But that doesn’t really matter.

The other cool bit, is refreshing the plugins. Lots of useful plugins have been created since I first wrote it, in particular, wp-cache, xml-sitemaps, sociable, and all-in-one-seo. I ditched the four separate seo plugins I had been using, and replaced them with all-in-one-seo, although it did mean losing the tags I had created with the old plugin. Tough.

At work we (I) am creating tutorials for updating WordPress, for use by clients that we build WordPress blogs for. Although so far, the tutorials are a bit blurry. Stay tuned for an announcement on when they are ready.

cheers