S60 blog editor: here's what I want

Ricky shot me an IM this morning letting me know that he’s just got hold of an S60 wordpress client. Good timing after the ‘mobile blogging is an arse‘ post yesterday. I don’t know it’s name, the author or anything about it as yet as we’re doing a little experiment together. He’s going to take a look at it this afternoon and do some test posting with it.

I, on the other hand, am going to write about my expectations. I’m excited, you see, because I’ve been after a blog editor for my Nokia E61i for absolutely ages. There is nothing more annoying that writing a post I’m quite please with, publishing it, then going out somewhere, only to get an email on the E61i from the company I was writing about, thanking me for the post and pointing out that I’ve made a typo in the link to their site. Not good. I want to change it there and then — and it bugs me across the day until I get back to a machine to sort it.

Occasionally I give the Nokia browser – or the Opera browser – a go, but they just cannot, cannot, CANNOT handle the web interface to wordpress very well at all (although I’ve been looking at a plugin that apparently makes the whole thing a little easier). The big issue is editing a long piece on the fly. You need a proper scrolling text window for that.

I got so frustrated that I went to elance.com to try and hire a Symbian coder to build a client for me. Here’s what I posted:

I would like you to develop a Symbian-based application that will enable me to post new content and edit existing content on my WordPress blog when I am not at my computer.

I would like you to create an application that will use the WordPress API (usually http://www.yourname.com/xmlrpc.php) to manage a blog via a Nokia E61i handset.

I’d like the application developed so that it’s completely compatible with the Symbian Series 60 platform so that it will work with a Nokia E61 or Nokia E61i.

Application features required: –

* Ability to author new content — (title, body, select a category) and publish this content to the blog
* Ability to list and edit existing content
* Ability to edit application settings (for example, change the username, password and API URL for the blog, just in case I want to change my blog address)

I didn’t add the ability to approve comments and that sort of thing as I didn’t want to over complicate things. Talking with the likes of Dan and Jay from ROKTalk (the best and most capable mobile programmers I know), they confirmed that this kind of thing — an API interface with wordpress is, essentially, a piece of simplicity. It’s not difficult if you’re a bit good.

Alas, no one answered my enquiry on elance.

Now, if the application Ricky’s demoing this afternoon does the three things above, for the first version, I’ll be very happy.