28 blogging tasks you can do from your phone

Do you spend more time near your smartphone than your computer? You can still get plenty of work done on your blog when you're on the go with these mobile-friendly tasks!

If you're anything like me — juggling paying work, parenting, home life, errands, fitness — you might find limited time to sit down at an actual desk to blog or work on your blog-related tasks. So here's a roundup of plenty of things you can do while you're on your smartphone or tablet.

A few of these links are affiliate links, but most are just free apps. I use what I recommend.

1. Draft a blogpost.

   If you're a minimalist blogger (mostly plain text), you might be able to post from your smartphone using one of the blogging apps (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr on Android & iOS), using email uploads (Blogger, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress), or navigating to the site on mobile.
   
   For me, I find the apps and mobile experience inadequate for all the images and coding and customization I love to cram into my posts, so I prefer to finalize things on desktop. BUT, I can absolutely WRITE a blogpost draft while I'm out. I just prefer to do it in email. I use Gmail's Inbox app and like that it saves my drafts well. I just pop my own address into the to field, make the subject line my title, and then Swype away in the text field. I'm Swyping this right now, matter of fact. I'd like to experiment, once I figure out the best headset, with dictating blogposts while I walk, using Dragon Dictation, the native Google voice-recognition on my phone, or another speech-to-text capability. (Here's how one person does this via Evernote.)
   
    
   

2. Edit your drafts.

   If you have a blogpost draft you want to edit, email it to yourself or upload it to Google Docs and use the Google Drive app (Android & iOS) to access it. It has a nice autosave feature, and it will sync with your desktop version of course.
   
    
   

3. Check and reply to email.

   I find being on my phone actually makes this easier, because brevity feels right. Bam. Email done.
   
    
   

4. Read other blogs.

   I use Feedly for my subscriptions now, and I've learned the mobile gesture shortcuts to make the process easy. Save for later articles you want to read in depth or share, or just do it now if you have the concentration time.
   
    
   

FeedBurner feed too big? How to fix it

My recent FeedBurner woe:


Click any image to embiggen.

The past few days, I noticed signs that my RSS feed for Hobo Mama wasn't updating, though it took me awhile to believe it.

I caught glimpses first in CommentLuv entries when I commented on other sites. It kept pulling up my "Gratitude Challenge" post from Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, even though I subsequently posted on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I didn't really think much of it the first few times, or the first couple days — I just used Ping-o-Matic to give my feed a little boost and figured it would fix itself.

But after it had been a week, I noticed the delay wasn't just in CommentLuv. It was in the sidebar widgets on my other sites; it was in Google Reader; and — most obviously, now that I looked for it — the delay was on my feed's page itself.

I went to FeedBurner, through which I burn all my feeds, for the answer. I clicked right through to the humorously named "Troubleshootize" tab, hoping the humor didn't mean they wouldn't take this plight seriously.