The niggling problems of managing a blog exclusively from my iPhone are becoming increasingly apparent to me.

The main problem is, as I suspected, links. Not only are links the “currency” of bloggers (links improve Google pagerank, meaning lots of incoming links puts your site higher in Googles search listings), but they are also the best way to refer readers to other stories that you’re talking about.

Moving from a website to an application (like the WordPress app I’m using to blog from) is a one-way street. To my knowledge, there’s no way that the iPhone can copy a link from Safari and paste it into an application. The WordPress bookmarklet I referred to in a previous post (that would take me as long to link to as it would to write this whole post) doesn’t work reliably from the iPhone, and won’t let you add a link to an existing post- only to start a new one.

There are also problems with the WordPress website interface, mainly because of the lack of cursor keys- scrolling through the box you enter text into is a slow, temperamental and tedious process.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out if I’d be “cheating” at my own rules to add a Technorati Favourite link to my sidebar. On one hand, I’ve already decided that customizing the theme via the desktop (as opposed to doing literally everything from the mobile), on the grounds that whoever made the theme I use didn’t do it from an iPhone. But putting something personal and specific to my own blog feels like I’m crossing a line from this admittedly grey area into the “breaking my own rules” territory.

But right now, posting simple links is proving so tedious that I’m resigned to either abandoning my rules, or facing the fact that I’m probably going to either live with a virtually linkless blog (and therefore struggle to attract much of an audience)

I’m going to see if my rudimentary Javascript knowlede is good enough to build a bookmarklet that will do the job, but I’m not optimistic. So I’m probably going to have to hope for a major update of the WordPress application. (Which, as I don’t have a Mac, I can’t provide any help with myself.)

All in all, rather frustrating…

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