Maemo WordPy; a WordPress Editor for Nokia N800

Maemo WordPyI’m currently testing out WordPy which is a Maemo-based offline editor for WordPress. So far it seems like a pretty handy addition to the N800 which is already one of my “won’t leave home without it” gadgets.

This is a fairly full featured application, capable of performing nearly all of the basic tasks that one regularly needs to do while blogging.

In addition to allowing you to create posts and either upload them as drafts or publish them directly, WordPy also gives you a third option; saving a file on your N800 to be uploaded at some later point in time.

This is a pretty cool feature and one that is certain to be appreciated by anyone who has ever lost some or even all of a post while writing directly into WordPress only to have lost connectivity while in the middle of a post.

Best of all this feature even works! I was able to save this post to a new folder that I created specifically for that purpose and was able to come back a day later to pick up exactly where I had left off.

Unfortunately, there is one small issue here that definitely needs to be handled (or at least requires better instructions for set up). It seems that WordPy doesn’t support auto-discovery of the correct URL to enable posting or uploading the file. If you don’t know your exact URL to enable this (and it generally is not going to be http://www.yourblog.com/yourblogsoftware-admin) then you’ll find yourself more or less stuck. Frequently the url is something like: http://yourblog.com/xmlrpc.php

I figured I would take a shot and sure enough, this worked fine for me. In any case, it might help to pay a visit to WordPy’s homepage where there are some decent basic explanations for the various icons and functions of the application.

It is very important to note that Python must be installed in order for WordPy to work. Luckily this is made clear on Maemo.org and the files to download and install Python are linked from the WordPy entry.

Not having auto discovery could be a complete killer for someone inexperienced at blogging. The posting URLs are often not easily discovered and many neophyte bloggers may not even know what they are and will thus think that the application isn’t working correctly when they try their blog URL and it fails to work.

I’m going to write a note to the author of WordPy; Daniel Martin Yerga to thank him for his efforts (this is an open source program), to let him know about the post and to see if he has future plans that include auto-discovery.

All in all, I give WordPy pretty high marks. It seems to do just about everything one would wish for on an ultra-ultra mobile device and with the small issue of finding the correct URL for set up it seems to have reasonably good usability, particularly for a 0.4 release of the software.

If you have an N800 and you blog, I do suggest you pay a visit to Maemo.org and give WordPy a try.