As you know, if you have read my introductory post or the page About the blog in the side bar, I compose and publish my blog posts mainly on my iPhone. This has the advantage of immediacy but to do so I need an editor that is comfortable to use and is completely reliable. By “reliable”, I mean that it always works as I expect it to and doesn’t lose my work if I close it down or switch it out to do something else. Another requirement is that it must provide a reasonably easy way for me to send or transfer the finished post to WordPress. I have left till last one essential requirement: the editor must be able to accept images and then transfer these with the text to WordPress when I am ready to publish.

A surprisingly large number of editors, notes apps and word processors fall at the very first fence: they do accept images. I find it unbelievable that anyone would create an editor or notes app for the iPhone that cannot insert images. The iPhone, after all, was designed around its ability to display graphics. Any editor that cannot fo that should be relegated to the Stone Age.

The hours I have spent seeking and trying editors, if joined together as a single time span, would probably amount to several days. I will admit that it has become something of an obsession.

In my post A better blog editor, I concuded that the best app I could find for the job was one that was already on board, Notes. I still think it has a lot going for it though it is not perfect. Its virtues:

1. It saves as I work and therefore never loses an edit, even when I swap it out to do something else or even close down the iPhone;

2. It accepts images and treats them sensibly, i.e. sizes them to fit the display;

3. It allows me to put texts in italics and bold and transfers these styles to WordPress;

4. It allows me to post the article to WordPress, using copy and paste;

5. I can then save the edit to iCloud Drive and later transfer it to my PC for safe-keeping.

It has one fault, though this is annoying rather than serious. Once my draft reaches a certain length, every time I swap Notes out and then return to it, it has placed the pointer at the top of the text, so that I have to scroll all the way down before continuing the edit.

A minor problem is that it has no facilities for editing the image, by which I mean setting the alignment and perhaps caption. I therefore have to go through the post in the WordPress editor to deal with each image in turn.

In the above mentioned post, I reported that I had tried the editor in the WordPress app and that it had lost my edit. When I had calmed down, I realized that there was a way to avoid that but by then I had given up on that editor. Today, I decided to give it another try.

To avoid loss, I wrote a few words of my test post and then saved it as a draft. The app does not save automatically, as far as I can see, and so it is necessary to explicitly save the text before leaving the editor. You do this by clicking on Update.

Before continuing, I should make one thing clear. WordPress has not one but two editors. There is the Classic Editor that we have been happily using for years and the spanking new, all bells and whistles editor, known both as the Block Editor and as the Gutenberg Editor. Many people do not like the Block Editor. I am one of them. It is unnecessarily complicated for my purposes. I am sticking with the Classic Editor until they stop supporting it in, I think, 2022. In what follows, therefore, “the editor” is taken to be the Classic Editor.

Actually writing the text in the WordPress editor is much like writing it in Notes. There are buttons for italics, bold, underline and strike-through. You press the button to switch the style on and press it again to switch it off. All very simple and straight forward.

There is a plus sign in a circle which you press in order to insert an image into the text. Pressing it opens a menu allowing you to choose from several sources including the obvious ones of camera and image library. Once chosen the image appears in the text properly sized.

One advantage of working in the WordPress editor is that as soon as you have inserted the image, you can immediately edit it, e.g. centre it, set the alt definition and, if you wish, a caption.

It was when looking at image editing that I made a serendiptious discovery. There is a certain button in the functions bar above the keyboard to which I had hitherto given no attention. It is out of sight on the right hand side and you have to swipe the bar left to reach it. It looks like this: </>

I pressed it and – guess what? – yes, it switched me to the HTMLeditor! If I put an exclamation mark at the end of the last sentence, it is not because there is anything particularly surprising about this. Rather it is a reflection of my joy on finding it. There is another way to access the HTML editor from the menu but being able to click a button means you can easily switch it on just to do one thing and then switch it off again.

Why did this make me joyful? Well, because it means that I can enfold an image in HTML code of my own confection in order to set how it appears. Here is an example:

Coffee at Jusaka
(Photo by Tigger)

I have mentioned before that if you use WordPress’s caption function it produces and ugly result. For an example, look at the pictures in my post A little more about wasps. Having quick and easy access to HTML means I can add enough code to centre the image and centre a caption underneath it. No dull grey frame and no off-centre caption.

So am I going to write all my posts from now on in the WordPress editor? To be honest, I don’t know. I think I will give it a try now that I know it will not lose my work as long as I remember to save before quitting or swapping out. One disadvantage is that there is no backup copy left after posting. So far I have not needed the backup but who knows what the future may hold?