Blogger from Mobile

If you haven't heard, Google is shuttering the quaisi-popular service: Google+. They gave a flimsy excuse and a deadline for everyone to get off-board and go find a new online home. Most people, like myself, have been trying out other options: MeWe, Cake.co, Diaspora/Pluspora, Minds as well as others.

I thought I might spend more time Blogger'ing and so attempted a few posts from the Blogger app as the real appeal to G+, aside from the social aspect, was the easy by which one could post on the go. So, I turned to the Blogger app, which hasn't seen any developer love from Google since 2016. That's two years for those of you paying attention to such things.

Here's what I've learned:

• The Blogger app needs some developer love.
• One cannot post pictures using the Blogger app. Either from the cloud (Photos) or from the Android. In fact, even attempting to do so will crash the app for some ungodly reason and prevent the draft post from saving to Blogger.
• Drafts with images attached will not sync to Blogger in the drafts section either. 

And ... 

• Apparently, anything without an image attached to it will indeed sync to Blogger, whether that's a draft or a post. 

The good news is, I figured out how to post to Blogger from email. In fact, it's fairly simple if limited. Go to Blogger.com ⇨ Settings ⇨ Email ⇨ and set up a "special email" address and define the usage terms, such as automatically post or save to drafts. Surprisingly, posting a picture worked just fine, you just don't have control over any formatting, such as [center], [right], [left], bold, italics or anything else. So, it might work in a pinch while on-the-go, but I don't think it'll be the primary way to interact with Google's Blogger environment. Maybe if all I want to do is share an image ... 

So, I plan on Blogging more frequently, maybe creating a habit and maybe trying to upload other forms of media, such as audio files or videos that have been sync'd to Photos already. I don't know how I'll use it, so expect some experimentation.