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.