I’ve been using my Android phone for a lot of my interactions with the interwebs lately, which admittedly left me with some, shall we say interesting spell corrections from the Hero’s tiny little on-screen keyboard (I’m using it now and have only just thought to turn it on it’s side to make the keyboard more usable), but one of the apps that I really should use now is WordPress for Android (WP4A), especially as they released an update pretty much just for me.
Twitter is just too Damn easy. You can post what you’re doing and BAM it’s out there (it even updates my Facebook status, how lazy is that?), but where’s the narrative? It’s great to let people know what you are doing at that exact moment in time, and it only takes a few seconds to do, but you can’t get much back story in to it, you can’t let people know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Hence the need for a blog.
Anyway, I digress (something else you can’t do on Twitter with any success), having been playing with WordPress for a while now I thought a nice, simple way to post to it might be useful. I already have a mobile admin plugin installed, but for that I have to visit the site and login, adding a couple of extra steps to what should be a simple process. WordPress for Android makes all that nice and simple.
If you’re still reading this then well done. 99% of people I know, and let’s face it that’s likely to be the only people reading this, probably won’t have gotten past the first paragraph. Congrats.
Having installed WP4A I haven’t really played with it that much, that is until they did an update and it started crashing. I checked out the forums and after a little poking about it seems that a couple of people were having the same problem, although for them it would seem some non-alpha-numerical characters in their passwords may have been the issue. It seemed like my crash was caused by a similar problem, however it turned out to be unhandled apostraphies in the titles of posts that had been commented on that was causing the crash.
Having discovered that, a further problem with the special >> that WordPress uses in trackbacks and pingbacks that caused a further crash. I removed the offending comments and editing the post titles all worked fine.
After posting my findings on the forum a new version has been posted that has now fixed all the issues I had. All that in less than a week. Result.
If you care, these issues only seem to affect users running Android 1.5 and if Orange had released the 2.1 update already for my Hero then this would probably never have come to light. So there you go.
This is probably one of my longer posts, and all done on a touchscreen keyboard. Joy.
