With my beloved 13″ MacBook Pro Retina (early-2015) aka THE last good MacBook Pro in the shop, I’ve had to get productive on the iPad Pro I recently picked up. Probably have a whole host of things I’ve learned on making the transition to iPad that are worth sharing but top of mind is getting wordpress blog posts working.

Mostly this is because the only app (so far) from my MacBook that doesn’t have an equivalent on the iPad is MarsEdit. MarsEdit is hands-down the best blog writing software ever made. ANd it doesn’t run on iPad.

So I’m using the iOS WordPress application. Not nearly as nice and getting it up and running was fraught with hoops I had to jump through.

First was updating all sorts of stuff on my Linode box because, well, I’ve been lazy and running all sorts of old versions of php. What was cool here was being able to use the Linode console in safari to upgrade Ubuntu. Truly living in a sci-fi like future when a table can do this:

Anyway, once the housekeeping updates were completed, I was still running into errors posting entries (especially attachments) to this site.

I believe some of the errors were tied to the fact that I have a self-hosted wordpress site but was logged into the iOS wordpress application using my “wordpress.com” account. So I logged out of the wordpress app and instead, I used the credentials from my self-hosted site.

But before I could do that I needed to resolve the “Couldn’t connect. XML-RPC is missing from server” error that I was getting. I don’t think I ever had to install an xml-specific package for earlier versions of PHP but now that I’m running 7.3 I had to run:

sudo apt-get install php-xml
sudo service apache2 restart

That allowed the wordpress iOS application to connect to my self-hosted site and upload images.

Heady times, for sure!

Still looking for a MarsEdit equivalent on iPad. Not hopeful. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage documents/writing on this thing. I like the built in Notes app for its syncing but interface wise it’s sort of lame and it means copy/pasting text into the wordpress app. Also lame.

Will update and the workflow process improves.