I’m testing out MarsEdit for posting to my weblog. Lately I’ve had a few incidents where I was composing something and closed the browser window before realizing that I was getting rid of something I couldn’t get back. The worst incident involved 2,000 words or so that I composed for our wiki at work. Normally I save compulsively every few minutes, but I worked on this article for a long time without saving, and then I threw it all away by mistake.
Offline composition is looking like a pretty good idea in light of that recent error.One of my coworkers working on extending Mediawiki so that it supports the Atom Publishing Protocol, so getting used to using an offline blog editor could help me in that regard as well.
I’m going to try out Ecto as well, but I’m so happy with NetNewsWire that I decided to check out MarsEdit first.
I can say right off the bat that one of the big differences is that with an offline publishing tool I’ll probably completely change my style of work. The offline publishing tool makes it easy to start out a post by just jotting down a title and some ideas to return to whenever I have time. I’ve never gotten in the habit of doing so with the Web interface.
June 5, 2006 at 3:05 pm
I live for MarsEdit. Its a great, great blog editor but also the NNW “post to blog” button and the MarsEdit bookmarklet make it really easy to collect random bits of net stuff to post about later.
My only problem with it is that I’ve gotten so used to writing and thinking in marsedit for my blog posts when I’m away from my mac and I get the urge to post I can’t go back to the web interface. I have to wait until I get home. sob.
June 5, 2006 at 3:27 pm
After 2 years on gmail, I think that is their biggest, NON-copied innovation – the auto save feature is a life saver. I also do the “title and ideas” thing, and then let it sit in my drafts until I’m ready. It’s not a hard feature to impelment, but one that gets overlooked easily.
June 5, 2006 at 3:38 pm
MarsEdit saves your posts locally, in case of disaster. As far as I know, it lacks auto-save, but I’ve twice recovered almost all of what I’d been working on after system crashes.
There’s also a Textmate bundle out that allows you to compose and post from that editor. Couldn’t get it to work, though.
June 5, 2006 at 5:06 pm
I love MarsEdit. I used ecto’s predecessor, which I also liked, but I hated ecto when I tried it. I’m so taken with the ease-of-use of MarsEdit that I won’t write for a group blog that won’t let me use it to compose from the desktop. I’ve actually dropped out of an art blog project over this.
June 6, 2006 at 10:50 am
MarsEdit has certainly ramped up your frequency of posting! Glad to see it.
June 6, 2006 at 11:42 am
Yep, I’ve been posting mostly at rc3.org/ofinterest lately, but I have a bunch of stuff in the hopper for here.
I’ve also come to hate my design, so I’m working on a design that unites the two sites and generally makes things more usable.