Mobilize Your Blog This Holiday Season

With the holidays appearing thick and fast from now until next year, it’s a great time for meeting up with the people who are important to us, giving and receiving gifts, relaxing and indulging ourselves. But while you’re doing that, give a thought to your poor neglected blog this holiday season.

For blogs, this can be the loneliest time of year, the time when our posts grind to a halt and our readers drop off like flies. But don’t shed a tear, there is a solution.

Blog From Your Phone!

Sure, the last thing you want to do is sit behind a computer as turkeys emerge from ovens, gifts are ripped open and grandma busts her moves on the kitchen table. But you don’t have to be tied to the computer to blog —  not only does WordPress.com have the option to phone in a blog post, or email pictures and posts from any device you have on hand, but we also offer easy-to-use apps for several smartphones.

Let’s take a look at each of these options, starting with our super-cool phone apps.

WordPress Mobile Apps

If you’re packing a Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad or Android phone, you can download a free WordPress application to write and edit posts and pages, check stats and even moderate your comments. This gives you a comprehensive way of managing your blog on the move. You can find it on your phone’s app store/market, or find out more at these sites:

• WordPress for iOS (iPhone/iPad)
• WordPress for Android
• WordPress for Nokia
• WordPress for Blackberry

Post by Email

Love email and use it all the time — even on your phone? Then you’ll equally adore our Post-by-email feature. While it doesn’t offer as much flexibility as the WordPress mobile app, it’s a swift and handy way to update from anywhere. To enable Post-by-email, you first just need to do a little tweaking from your computer. Simply:

1. Head to the Dashboard menu and hit the My Blogs option:
   
2. Enable your blog or blogs for Post-by-email:
   
3. Copy-paste (or download the vCard for) the secret email address and send it to your mobile email address for later use:
   

Then, Post Via Mobile Email

1. Now, from your tablet, phone, laptop or other email-enabled thingy, just bash out an email. The email subject line turns into the post’s title.
2. If your device supports it, attach photo(s) to the email. Single photos appear in-line, more than one turns automagically into a gallery
3. Address it to the secret email address you found in the My Blogs menu
4. Hit send – and that’s it, your post is live!

Phone It In

But that’s not enough! What if you want to record audio of your carol singing antics, or the cat landing suddenly on your uncle’s sleeping face? You’ll need Post by Voice. Here’s how to dial in your call:

1. Head back to the (you guessed it) Dashboard > My Blogs menu:
   
2. Activate the Post by voice Enable button next to one or more blogs:
   
3. Jot down the secret phone number and your own private code (they’ll appear in the same place you pressed Enable)
4. You’re ready to start posting audio

Dialing in an Audio Call

1. Call the number you jotted down (smallprint – doing this outside of the U.S. may prove costly, as calls are charged at standard U.S. rates)
2. Enter your secret code (you wrote that down too, or committed it to memory, remember?)
3. Record audio of your talking, singing, shrieks of merriment or incidental seasonal sound effects. You have up to an hour to do so.
4. Hang up. Your audio post will hit your blog almost right away.

Bonus Round: Automatic Posting to Your Favorite Social Networks

Why go to the hassle of sending out multiple updates, when you can do it all at once? Before you take off for the holidays, be sure to set this up — and every time you publish a new blog post with your phone, it will automatically get sent to your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts.

Just:

1. Head back to the Dashboard > My Blogs menu:
   
2. Next to the blog or blogs you want to activate, under the Publicize column, check the services you want to automatically send updates to:
   
3. You’ll need to authorize the accounts to sync with WordPress:
   
4. Done! If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, check out our support docs all about Publicize.

So, yep, that means just new post can send five updates out to the world in the space of a second or two. Leaving more time for you to get on with some seasonal chillaxing.

You’re All Set

Hopefully between the apps, post-by-email and the voice-powered blogging feature, we’ve got your mobile needs covered this holiday season. Happy moblogging holidays!

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