The iPad was built with tasks like sending email, browsing the web, updating Twitter, and reading RSS feeds in mind. It makes a pretty good gaming device, and is the perfect size for watching videos on a plane. The iPad is revolutionizing vertical markets like healthcare and education where complex technologies became obstacles in the past. Apple’s tablet is even an important choice for disabled people who find its multi-touch interface more accessible than a keyboard or mouse. All of these capabilities sell iPads, but I didn’t purchase my iPad to do email, internet, Twitter, RSS, gaming, videos, healthcare, education, or accessibility. I bought my iPad to blog.

The promise of a multi-touch tablet is that it is more portable than a laptop, but can be just as functional given powerful software. Apple and the developer community have had over a year to explore the iPad’s potential, but a suitable blogging client has yet to materialize. Instead of waiting for an iOS version of MarsEdit I changed Egg Freckles CMS to a platform that does not require fancy APIs or specialized applications to publish from my iPad.

Stacey, Egg Freckles CMS, works with plain text files, and standard image file formats. I place the content I have written in Markdown along with the accompanying image into a new project folder and Stacey combines the two into published HTML. The hardest part is writing down what I have to say.

Elements is a plain text editor that syncs all of my writing with all of my Dropbox connected computers effortlessly while I type. Articles written in Elements appear in the Elements folder inside my Dropbox. To make the most out of Elements I created a symbolic link between the Elements folder inside my Dropbox and the local copy of Egg Freckles content I keep on my Mac.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites/Egg\ Freckles/stacey/content ~/Dropbox/Elements

That way I can create new projects, and edit older articles directly on my iPad using Elements while the results sync to the proper location on my Mac.

In addition to autosaving my work back to my Mac using Dropbox, Elements is also a great text editor. It features a built-in Markdown preview for when I need to take a look at my output. Multi-file search for when I am looking for a particular word or phrase. Word count, line count, and character count so I know when I am finished writing. The built-in scratchpad is useful for jotting down ideas or saving quoted text from web pages. I can email my work directly from Elements as an attachment for peers to review, and the built TextExpander and appearance customization means I am as comfortable writing in Elements as I am writing on my Mac. Of course once I have finished writing I still need to upload my work to Egg Freckles.

Textastic combines a powerful text editor with an FTP, and Dropbox file management. It is as close as you can get to Coda on the iPad. What I write in Elements I can quickly upload to Egg Freckles using Textastic. It is bridge between the written articles stored in Dropbox and the published articles I have uploaded to Sracey via FTP.

Textastic is also a powerful text editor for programming, coding websites, and applying Markdown. It can highlight syntax for more than 80 different languages, displays additional virtual keycaps for programming oriented characters, auto indents, and supports encodings like UTF–8, ISO–8859–1 or MacRoman. If I wasn’t so comfortable with Elements and its auto saving feature I would probably write all of my articles in Textastic’s text editor instead of just using it for editing HTML and Markdown.

I still have no way of applying the Atkinson dithering effect on images while blogging from my iPad. Until Tinrocket releases HyperDither for iOS I will have to be content with dithering my articles accompanying images on the Mac ahead of time. Still with Elements, and Textastic on my iPad nothing stops me from blogging, editing, marking up, and marking down all of Egg Freckles 50 existing articles as well as everything I plan to write in the future.