So I just posted from the iPhone app and although I now have a shiny new post on the site it’s clear that the app is a little glitchy (see screenshot). For some reason the app first posted an item with little title and text tags before posting my real post. In addition it seems the app doesn’t handle ampersands (&) very well. We’ll see if it does better when publishing…

(now posting from the keyboard - much easier)

It seems the ampersand didn’t cause a problem after all - just shows up funny in the categories list and in the “write” mode in the application. But the screenshot worked fine - not many options for how you incorporate an image like that - how you want text aligned, whether you want it linked to a larger version etc - but it’s probably best to keep things simple in a mobile app.

And no mystery tag post this time around, which means it was a one-off - I’ll have to test it on my other blogs to see if it happens every time you first use the app on a blog or if there was just an error somewhere this time around. At any rate, another useful application from the App Store - and best of all this one’s free, as many of the best ones are…

For info, this was the mystery post that showed up (which I’ve deleted to avoid clutter and confusion) - also viewable in its original format in the screenshot above:

!$title$!

July 22nd, 2008

!$text$!

Update: glad to see I wasn’t the only one with this problem: the venerable TechCrunch, no less:

Link apparently since removed, at least from the TechCrunch homepage.

Hurrah! WordPress finally released their iPhone app today, which was heavily trailed by WP. This is a test post that I’m writing using the app. Thank goodness for the auto correct feature on the iPhone which is preventing this from being an utterly tedious experience. I can’t imagine writing a long post on here but it will be great for the occasional short post on the run. Here goes!

As of right now, I am unable to view the Wordpress.com website (Wordpress.org is up just fine). Strangely, blogs hosted on Wordpress, with .wordpress.com addresses, are still up, at least from the look of a couple I checked.

Doesn’t downtime with major websites seem to be becoming more and more regular? Twitter has been notorious of late for its frequent outages, Amazon’s cloud-based computing servers went down last week for several hours (and see here for an unfortunate combination of the two), Flickr had a nasty outage around a month ago… So far, there seems to be no connection between all these outages, but at some point you have to wonder - is there some kind of bug going around that people haven’t cottoned onto, or is it just that traffic has become so spiky that it’s almost impossible to predict peak load anymore?

Either way, it’s a reminder of how fragile online services can still be. Although I’m not an Amazon cloud computing customer, the outages at Twitter and Flickr were bad enough that I experienced both of them as a user just by needing to use the services at times when they were unavailable. Wordpress.com is similar - I never use it since I use the hosted version on my own domain, but I wanted to set up the Akismet comment spam fighting plugin and that requires my Wordpress API key, which, of course, I can only get by going to wordpress.com…

Here’s to more uptime later in 2008.