PostBot 1.0.5 on the way
Another minor update to improve PostBot’s handling of large images.
With this update, PostBot can handle images up to 3.5 MB in size, and will provide a meaningful error message if an image is too large for it.
For reference: in my experience, images taken with the Dream’s built-in camera application are usually around 300kB, and images taken with SnapPhoto using the “large” profile and 100% quality can be up to around 1MB. The largest image I have seen from my 7-megapixel camera was just over 2MB.
I’m going to use it for a few days, and then, if all goes well, release!
The Robot Factory 
Does your app work for blogs that are NOT on the wordpress network? I host my own and I keep getting an error 400 when i try to save the info for my blog.
It does work for self-hosted wordpress blogs.
I have tested it with several different versions on my own server, and they all worked. However, you are not the only one who seems to be having trouble with this!
If you are receiving an HTTP 400 error, you should check that XMLRPC access to your blog is enabled.
If that is not the problem, and you can provide me with the URL of your blog, I could do some investigation. Since I can’t reproduce this issue myself, this would be a big help!
I’ve got 1.0.4 installed. I can post the article just fine, it’s when I attach a picture that the posting fails. I get the following error “http status code 500 != 200”.
The picture is 2048×1536 at 418 KB taken from the phone itself.
I tried this with two different posts and two different pictures.
I also tried cropping both pictures, and the post went through if I cropped the pictures.
I keep my xmlrpc file at http://www.postmodernsideshow.com/xmlrpc
Other than that, it’s a great application. Keep up the good work.
If the uploading problems get fixed, there’s a donation coming your way.
Hi,
good app so far, but I´m missing to post a draft to WP. So, if I´m on the way, writing something, I don´t want for any reason, that the article will be published directly, there is no way to edit the Draft in WP. So I have to publish first and edit afterwards..
Next thing: Would be great to set the image-size.
Is something planned to implement such features?
Cheers,
Sasha
Hi,
I’m getting an error when I first try to configure it for for my blog. (http://zonino.org/blog/)
The error is something like (not quite accurate as I couldn’t cut and paste):
An error occurred saving blog:
org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException: Expected: START_TAG {null}methodResponse (position:START_TAG (empty) @1:6 in java.io.InputStreamReader@4……)
At the server end it is the debian version of wordpress 2.0.10 which may be where the problem lies…
Hi Daniel,
It would seem to me that your server is allowing uploads of a certain size or less, and rejecting those that are to large. (HTTP 500 is Internal Server Error, so maybe your server is not intentionally rejecting the upload, but does not have enough space available.)
PostBot will resize the image down to 1024×768 or less itself, so I’m curious to know what size you’re cropping to. If you crop down to smaller than this, then my theory stands, but if not, then I’m not sure what is going on!
HTH.
Hi Sasha,
I actually tried to implement uploading as a draft to WP, but it seemed that the XMLRPC call that allows modifying a post was not setting the “published” flag when I updated it, which meant that if a post was uploaded as a draft, it could never be published through a client like PostBot.
I then tried to have PostBot remove the post, and post it again to set the “published” flag, but the WordPress call to delete a post didn’t seem to work properly either!
In any case, I agree that that would be a useful feature, and may try to get it in again someday.
As for setting image size, I plan on adding a per-blog setting for this. Currently PostBot will scale to 1024×768 or less, but it is not configurable.
The tricky part with the scaling feature is that the Android API does not always allow me to specify the exact size I want an image to be without loading the full-sized image first, and many full-sized images cause OutOfMemoryErrors pretty quickly. I must therefore load an image in a scaled form right from disk, and Android only seems to support this if the scaling is to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. sizes. So unless I find another way to scale images on load, I can’t really implement a reliable image scaling feature.
Thanks for your interest, and I will take another crack at one or both of these features again, most likely for 1.1.
Hi Tim,
I certainly have not tested with that version, so that could be the issue!
I will take a look and see what I can see on your site. There may be something obvious even without an account…
Thanks!
If there is anything I can do to help you track down the issue let me know.
Really, really, really love the app — by far the best wordpress mobile app I’ve used. The biggest thing I’d like is a way to set the image size — either being able to resize the image or even just resizing the thumbnail would be awesome. Even if you have a way to set the img tag’s css class so that posts that are uploaded via postbot don’t look so different from other posts.
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for the feedback – I am actually thinking of adding some more advanced settings once I get image alignment and tags in for 1.1.0.
I was thinking I could have per-blog settings that allowed you to insert snippets of HTML in every post. There would be a snippet for beginning of post, before text, after text, before each image, after each image, and at the end of the post. Not too many people would use it, I don’t think, but for the experts out there it would be nice. Also, I would be able to recommend to people who want formatting options beyond what I provide that they can try to achieve what they want this way.
If you have any thoughts on this, let me know!
Hi Tim,
I tried loading the xmlrpc.php file on your blog to see if it was accessible. I expected to see a message like this one, from my blog when I try the same thing:
——————
XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.
——————
However, while I see this message when I try to access your xmlrpc.php file, it is preceded by some error messages:
——————
Warning: include_once(/usr/share/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/admin.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/share/wordpress/xmlrpc.php on line 42
Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘/usr/share/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/admin.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear’) in /usr/share/wordpress/xmlrpc.php on line 42
XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.
——————
I would guess that PostBot isn’t going to be able to post until these errors are resolved. I’ve had issues getting WordPress properly set up on Ubuntu, so if the Debian package is similar, which it likely is, perhaps there is a configuration issue.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the upfate! That definitely sounds cool. I love the idea of the code snippets.