For someone who has very few readers (other than the lovely family and friends that might accidentally waste a few minutes of their day clicking through from Facebook hoping to glimpse a picture of my much-more-interesting daughter), I spend far too much time deliberating about how I should proceed with my blogging. At first, I considered abandoning my Mama Kate blog so that I could incorporate the mama blogging in the Journal category here at all five horizons.  I didn’t like this option because a) I like my mamakate domain name and blog title and b) I worried it would dominate the blog and alienate any readers out there who want to read about books/TV/nonsense. So then I seriously considered binning this blog altogether but I just couldn’t bring myself to let it go to pasture.  I am strangely fond of this little space on the internet.

Brand spanking new blog header for Mama Kate. Using the word spanking will increase my blog traffic for the day.

Having decided, then, to soldier on with both blogs (some may say foolhardy, some may say they don’t really care either way), I started to think about why (apart from the obvious having-a-baby-and-moving-house-on-the-same-damn-day thing) I have been updating my blogs less, and reading others’ blogs less for that matter, I realised that it all came down to one pesky, delicious, delightful, occasionally frustrating (*flash video arghhh*) device – my iPad. (I am starting to get the point, you’ll be glad to know.)

Their marketing photos make me drool. It's a weakness.

Now let me first say that I do LOVE my iPad.  It was an enormously generous gift and I use it daily, without fail.  I also have to say that when it was first released, I was skeptical. To me, it was just a large iPhone, which I already have. No, rather, it was a large iPod touch (so not even as good as an iPhone which you can at least make calls on). I scoffed at the lack of Flash video support and thought that using an iPad would be continually frustrating.  I was largely wrong.  I love using it to read and update Twitter, browse Facebook, read my emails and check my Tumblr dashboard for the latest pictures of robots and cool treehouses and the like.  As a breastfeeding mama, its compact size (compared to a laptop) and its generous screen (compared to an iPhone) has made it possible for me to stay online and keep myself occupied during those long, lonely, boring hours in the middle of the night watching films and playing Solitaire, Angry Birds and Scrabble.

Warning: prolonged game play may cause Angry Bird Flu* (*not my joke)

BUT (and that’s a fairly sizeable but) the iPad is no friend to a blogger.  Whilst the iPad is a great device to be an observer of the internet, it’s not so great at helping you be a participant.  There are two main causes of this: the touch-screen keypad and the lack of flash support.  The first undoubtedly makes typing a post a slower, more laborious process.  More mistakes are made and are slower to correct than with a proper keyboard.  The lack of scrolling also makes using the blog-writing interface more difficult. Sure, I could invest in an iPad keyboard but I don’t really want to spend £50 to make my iPad less portable when I have a perfectly good laptop that does the job so much better.  But the real problem is the old Flash chestnut.

It will help you make a link. And that's about it.

Most blog platforms use some kind of flash for their visual editors which allow bloggers to type in a WYSIWYG environment (please don’t judge any lack of correct jargon-use, I skipped Blogger School). So when using the iPad, you only have the HMTL editor to write blog posts. So that blog post that was already slower and harder to type? Just got even harder because now nearly all the formatting code has to be written out long-hand.  Photos are harder to manipulate. I have spent WAY too many minutes looking for a decent iPad app to use for updating my blogs but I have come to the conclusion that Apple don’t really care about blogs (hence my stroppy title) because apart from Squarespace, who have just released their new sparkly iPad app, no blogging platform seems to have found an acceptable solution.  Even WordPress, who I adore as a general rule, have a twitchy, buggy app that is barely usable.  It made me think again about Squarespace but that monthly fee for two blogs is just really not feasible (I can’t really justify the expense due to my previously mentioned lack of readership).

So despite my love for the shiny Apple gadget, it will never replace my laptop.  Whether I am editing photos and uploading them to Flickr or Facebook, commenting on a blog post or writing a blog post myself, I need my laptop more than ever since getting to sit at the iMac or PC in our study is a real challenge with Evelina taking so much of my time.  I am determined to become more of a participant and less of a lurker in 2011 so that I keep both my dear blogs alive (hopefully posting on both at least once a week) and well, using all the lovely technology that we are lucky enough (crazy enough? geeky enough??) to have in the house.