First Time Using The MarsEdit Blog Authoring App

Fellow ZIO'er Andy Beach turned me on to trying MarsEdit, a great piece of software from Red Sweater, for creating and managing blog posts. Until today, I have been using BBEdit, which is quite simply one of the best pieces of software ever written for the Mac. It's a text editor, designed for programmers, and usually I use it to write and edit HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc., in my capacity as a web developer. For blogging, I would copy and paste my blog post code into our online blog editing system (which end up being 95% regular text with a few HTML elements like images, and links and Bold tags and stuff like that), and that's been working fine for me for 4 months. We had been having some issues getting MarsEdit to connect with the blogging system on my end, so I haven't been able to use it until our site redesign. Which, by the way, I hope all of you dig as much as we do - our design and development team did a marvelous job. ((Applause!)) I'll look at my first time trying to create a link, and inserting an image, and saving my post, after the jump!

Creating Links
So far I'm really digging this app. To create a link in my post, all I have to do is type the phrase that I want to become the link, select it, Command-Tab over to my web browser, visit the page that I would like to link to, select the URL, press Command-C to copy, Command-Tab back over to MarsEdit, press Option-Command-A for create link, and a popup window opens with the URL I had copied into the copy buffer auto-filled in, the press Return to "ok" the box and my link is built with the text that I had previously selected now linkable. I can even customize (in a preference window) whether or not that link should be automatically configured to spawn open a new window when the user clicks. It looks like you can also create any number of custom HTML tags as well, which just makes the whole process so fast.

Images
So let's see how I create an image. There's a menu to select "Insert Image or File..." and if I select that, I can either drag and drop an image into the well, or click "browse..." and find one, then I can select an image alignment (left right or none) from a drop-down menu, and once you specify (first time only) the "path" on your blog to where the image should go, you're home-free.

All of the details of my blog are available to me through the MarsEdit interface, (it downloaded all the settings for me) like categories, formatting, comment actions, everything. It supports a tremendous number of the most popular blogging systems too, Drupal, Moveable Type, WordPress, you name it. I will be using this app going forward for creating blog posts, and I will write another "How It's Been Going" review once I've mastered some of the other features, like previewing in a template based on the actual blog templates (Andy help!), and what ever other sophisticated features I can find once I've had some time to dig around. There is a 30 day fully functioning demo version available, if you're blogging on a Mac, check it out!