I never shy away from hijacking a great idea. I was reading Earl’s blog one day, this post, and came across this sentence:
As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, I may also switch from Ecto3 to MarsEdit 2 as my Mac client blog editing application — new year, new things to learn.
Well, to me, Earl is the Guru of Gadgets. I always look to his blog to find the latest-greatest-most-up-to-datest information about all things Mac! I’d never heard of Ecto3, MarsEdit 2, or dare I say, client blog editing applications. How embarrassing. I found, also, a link to a quick look that he did on several authoring tools.
I decided to have a look at MarsEdit 2. I figured that if it was good enough for Earl, it was good enough for me. I downloaded a trial version and am giving it a spin. It’s basically the same tool that Earl reviewed, but has more features. It makes authoring pretty easy. They even have a customizable template that you can use to make your preview look exactly like your site.
Setup is very easy. You add a blog, type in your URL, enter your user name and password, and setup is done.
Authoring is pretty easy:
- Create a new entry.
- Write your entry.
- Add media – This actually takes the photo, music, or video, places the HTML code into the page, and uploads the file to your web server. I really like this feature a lot, much better than using WordPress’s image upload, which broke a couple of times during the early versions because it depended on a particular version of some Adobe Flash uploader software. I resorted to using FTP to upload the images and type the links in myself. I don’t have to do that anymore. That saves a lot of time and frustration.
- Send to the blog as published or draft. Optionally, if you don’t want to send it yet, you can save it as a draft locally.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve not explored all of the features, but have only done enough to get it to work with my particular setup. The only thing that I see missing is the ability to schedule an entry to post at a later date. However, this is easily accomplished by logging in and setting the date/time through WordPress. I would imagine that this is not a standard feature as different blogs probably do it different ways.
Anyone else use authoring tools? If so, which ones?
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12 Responses to “MarsEdit”
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Umm, I feel dumb, but I didn’t even know anything like this existed. I shall begin my journey of exploration tonight.
Dude! Neither did I. That’s why I visit Earl’s site everyday. There’s always something new to learn.
Paul, there is a feature in MarsEdit to change the date/time of the post draft before posting and it will be released by WP at the new date/time — you can set it to any future date and time.. You should not have to log into WP at all.
Thanks, Earl. I found it: Post->Edit Date. I was looking at the actual editor, on the right, where the status is either draft or published. The thought never even crossed my mind to look at the menu! Doh!!!
I’ve been using Ecto for about a year. Good stuff.
OK, I am confused. Can someone share some enlightenment on why you would use a separate application for entering blog entires when WordPress has it so streamlined from within any browser?
I can only speak for myself, but here’s my thoughts:
First, I’ve used a blog client application since early 2006 so part of it is I’m comfortable doing it this way — habit!
Recently the WP editor has gotten much better and I’ve considered using the browser/WP Editor route, but technically I’ve found that with a client application I can create custom mark-up scripts that make layout easier, especially supporting custom CSS classes in my WP theme.
I like not having to be connected to the Internet to write a post.
The graphics handling in Ecto3 IMO is superior to WP, however I’m worried about the continuing support of Ecto3 since it was purchased from its original developer and few updates have been released recently. MarEdit2 is very stable and has a good workflow, performance, support and custom mark-up capability. It’s media handling capabilities are good to fair.
Those are a few of the things that come quickly to mind.
ah, OK – the internet connection thing makes sense. I am always connected when I post something, so I guess I didn’t think of that. It would certainly be useful if posting while on travel, flying, etc.
Thanks for showing me the light guys.
Mark: In just the short time that I’ve used it, I’ve found it very useful to be able to compose a complete blog post, offline. There’s not always an Internet connection available. It’s a matter of convenience.
Way to go, Paul. Now I have another application/tool I’m gonna have to probably learn.
You’ll master it in short order, I’m sure. Heck! You might even like it!
Hi guys, I was wondering if any of you who have purchased Mars Edit like myself, Im having problems uploading media from my Mac to my blog post that Im compiling with MarsEdit, it keeps throwing back a 406 error.