Thought it might be worth blogging about blogging on the move. I had far less Internet connectivity on tour than I expected, and certainly all the recent posts have been direct from the iPhone over the mobile network. There's always the concern about the cost of data roaming – and we've all heard horror stories of people coming home to huge bills – but the iPhone Typepad app that I've been using seems very efficient and a blogpost (like email) is only a few KB of data. The iPhone records the amount of data sent and received, and I've been keeping an eye on the total. Provided I don't open Safari there isn't a problem, and I keep data roaming switched off except when I need it.
I've been working hard at using the larger horizontal keyboard of the iPhone, which is much faster than the small hunt-and-peck vertical keyboard, but prone to a lot of errors; thumbs are big clumsy things! But I'm getting better.
The main problem with the otherwise very effective Typepad app is that there is a bug which prevents the text scrolling properly, so on any post longer than ten iPhone lines the last line gets lost off the bottom of the screen. My solution was to draft longer posts in the excellent Notebooks app and then copy and paste it all into Typepad. The other issue is that it posts as plain text with no obvious way to break paragraphs, hence some rather long paragraphs from me until I could get to them for a bit of editing. I think the solution, which I'm trying with this post, is to include the appropriate HTML tag. [UPDATE: No, this is not the solution!]
Finally, for the three weeks I was in Italy I found myself connected to a number of different phone networks. Almost all the time the iPhone showed full signal strength, whether I was in the city or out in the country on a regional train, and never once did I see it indicate 'No Service'. In common with many people on Eurostar, I imagine, the first thing I wanted to do on emerging from the Channel Tunnel and getting back on my home network was to phone or text family and friends. Not possible, unfortunately, as there was zero or intermittent signal almost all the way into London. Pathetic! Wake up, Orange, install some infrastructure!
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