Blogging is an interesting skill to develop. A friend sent this article on as something I would find interesting as I recently passed on an iPad purchase and bought a Thinkpad.X200 TabletPC.

I'll reference this article with points to help you see how a blogger works. One of the problems the iPad blog post runs into is the lack of multitasking.

Secondly, there’s the lack of multitasking in the iPad, which makes for working between apps and conducting research painfully difficult. A couple of multitasking apps might be helpful. For instance, BrowserNotes and MyMultiView allow you to open web pages and a notepad in the same application. There’s also iAnnotate PDF for reading and annotating PDFs. But these apps only go so far. There are still improvements that Apple needs to make for its mobile devices to get the one-open app limitation.

Why is multitasking so important, because part of blogging is you have many things up at same time to pull your research together.

The Wall of Limitations
If novel writing were what you wanted to do on the iPad, then you probably could get by just fine. But if the writing you do requires researching, quoting text, embedding URLs, adding images blog posts, and multitasking between apps—all of which is what bloggers do—then the iPad is going to push you back to your Mac desktop or laptop.

Being able to cut and paste is critical. I use Windows 7 Snipping Tool consistently to grab screen shots and paste them into blog entries. iPad clipboard functionality is ironically limited compared to use on the Mac.

Thirdly, a big issue for me as a blogger is the lack of a universal clipboard manager. No prolific blogger can pound out writing without a way to retrieve multiple snippets of text from the clipboard. The iPad, of course, like the iPhone, only saves one copy of text at a time. I’m not a developer, but I‘m pretty sure that Apple can include some sort of clipboard manager that can be accessed at least through Mail and word processing apps. There’s enough Mac desktop-based clipboard managers out there that Apple could easily borrow code and produce something similar for the iPad.

I use Windows Live Write a WYSIWG blogging tool. And, found it painful to hear the writer describe the use of editing tools on the iPad.

Writing Apps
There are plenty of writing apps for the iPad, beyond Pages, which work great up to a point for text editing. Apps like SimpleNote, MyWritingNook, and even the default Notebook for the iPad can be used draft pieces of writing.

And, don't forget if you are going to write you'll need the external keyboard.

However, I must say that serious writing is best done using an external keyboard. Apple’s wireless keyboard is the one I use, and I found it to be the best keyboard I‘ve ever used. The keys are quick and responsive, and the keyboard‘s small size makes it perfect for the iPad.

The author threw the conclusion at the beginning and I'll use it at the end.

Can You Blog On the iPad?

by Bakari Chavanu Jun 04, 2010

Can you blog on the iPad? The quick and honest answer is, no. Not as effectively as you might like.

This post is written in less than 10 minutes, and that includes reading, bouncing back and forth multitasking to the article.

If you can't hammer a post out in less than 10 minutes, look for another blogging process.