So I have discovered what the problem is with broken images.

My flow right now is to edit posts in an app called Day One. It allows me to do some basic formatting and insertion of images and does this all offline. The WordPress iOS app does not do offline editing at all if you want images. Bleh. I then copy paste the whole thing into the WordPress app, final tweaks, sacrifice a goat so the WiFi gods will let the photos upload before it times out, and publish the post.

Somewhere in the middle there, the img tag that is put into the post ends up referencing files locally on my phone, which of course y’all can’t see because, we’ll, you’re not using my phone.

Further, this only works from within the WordPress app. So the posts all look fine from in WordPress but not on the site in safari. Since I’ve had fairly unreliable internet at times, I’d chalked up that discrepancy to jut failing to download the images, as some worked, and some didn’t, so whatever, moving along.

Also this would probably have been plainly clear if I’d hit view source on the page in my browser but as far as I know there is no such thing in safari iOS and I don’t have a computer with me and haven’t used one since Invercargill. I had to use the web interface of the blog and look at the raw post to be able to figure out the problem. Ugh.

Images added to the post from directly within the WordPress app seem to work fine.

So.

I know what the problem is. Fixing it is going to be pain, as I have to fix the urls. Which is probably going to need me to find a computer and spend an hour or so. I will try to do that today but no promises, sorry.

Going forward it means my day one workflow doesn’t work. On top of that, I can’t reproduce the problem since there seems to have been an update which changed the copy paste behavior that I’ve now pulled down since arriving in a Queenstown. So things are kinda hairy at the moment. I’m going to experiment a bit but the posts for the next few days might be text only.

But right now I have an hour to get out of my hostel and I’m still in bed and my room looks like my backpack exploded in it so I need to get moving.

Update: I’ve now successfully reproduced the issue without using Day One. Copy pasting from the iOS Notes app does the same thing (among other issues):

Update: the photos should all be fixed now. This was incredibly toilsome as the links that got added to the post had no relation to the files that got uploaded to the blog, and the only place they “worked” was in the WordPress iOS app, so I am sitting at a computer in an internet cafe with my phone comparing the photos in the app and inserting them one by one into the posts. Considering most of the posts since day 3 had this issue, there were dozens of images that needed to get updated. Fortunately all of them actually did get uploaded, they were just not linked properly.

Anywho, they should be fixed. I am not certain what I’m going to do about this going forward, but for the moment I’m going to continue my existing flow, but probably use Notes instead of Day One, and hope that something somewhere gets fixed or I can figure something else out. Otherwise, I just may need to use a computer for an hour or so in every zero day town before posts go up. There are worse things that could happen!