Blogging on Phone

Hey folks!

By now you’ve probably heard me talk about fast crafting and fast posting a whole bunch of times! I’m really investing a lot into making my flow efficient because I’m seeing immediate returns!! I’m blogging more and crafting more already and feeling SO HAPPY! 🙂

Today I wanted to chat about the workflow I setup for myself to blog from phone. My biggest reason for doing this is I work fulltime and as a manager, attend lots of meetings through the day. I get ~5-10 mins in between meetings here and there throughout the day many times and it’s not always long enough to open my laptop and blog but it’s easier to do on phone.

Also now that I’m using my phone to click photos, it’s easier to edit them on phone too! With the photos right there, it made sense to put out the text content also from phone.

A few caveats before I explain my workflow now:

• I have a very good Android phone! The Google Pixel phone. You’ll want a good smartphone if you plan to do photo editing and blogging on it.
• I also have a self-hosted WordPress blog so I have the option of adding plugins to it as required for many things.

Photo Editing

I have started using flat-lay photography with backgrounds from this amazing company to take photos now. I am using lots and lots of tips from Yana Smakula’s excellent post to style my pics!

After taking the pics, I edit them with Snapseed. I also use Google Photos and have it backing up my photos automatically so if I end up blogging from my laptop, I don’t have to worry about getting the photo off my phone.

One more super advantage of phone photos is you get to add super cool overlays like this to your pic 🙂 I used Facebook Messenger overlays for this and just saved the image on phone then uploaded to WordPress through the app (described below).

Blogging

Did you know there is a WordPress app on Android? Yes! And you can connect it to your WordPress.com blog or to your self-hosted blog.

I have it connected to my blog now and use it to write my posts. It has all the options you’d have in the web version of WordPress so its easy to write the post, add photos, setup a featured image, etc. all from phone!

The only thing that doesn’t work from there is plugin shortcodes. If you don’t know what those are, they are the funny looking things in square brackets that you add to a post and when your post goes live, WordPress automatically replaces them with some more complex widget. Examples of shortcode uses are Inlinkz and the Download File I have in this post. So if I need any of those in any post I need to add them later on the web version from my laptop. However with fast blogging, it’s easier since I don’t link many products through the post.

Social Media

I also wanted to talk a bit about how I’ve automated my social media posting so any post to my blog is automatically available on a couple of my social media sites.

I’ve setup Twitter auto-post from my blog through my theme settings so it gets tweeted as soon as my post goes live. But for my Facebook page I wanted something different. I like to have a custom text there with a short link and an image.

I used Zapier to automate this flow and created a Zap to trigger when a blog post goes live. Zapier allows creating a template for the post to your Facebook Page. My template was for a Post Photo and included the WordPress post thumbnail as the photo as well as the WordPress post excerpt and link in the text field of the Facebook post.

Something to note here is I have anyways been making sure to write the Post Excerpt manually and adding the Featured Image for each post on my blog for quite sometime now. Couple of reasons for this:

• My theme displays the Featured Image and excerpt on the main page of the blog so I wanted to make sure I chose those myself.
• These are also picked up by feed readers like Feedley and seen by your subscribe-by-mail readers. So it gives them good content too!

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, I highly recommend doing both these for every post of yours.

That’s all for this post! I hope you notice the cool featured image here 😉 I created it on my phone of course!