I was telling a friend about my experience with offline blogging software. He pointed me to MarsEdit. I hadn’t heard of it before, it wasn’t a free application. I usually don’t download anything but free software. This time I did download it and after using MarsEdit for a couple of weeks I decided to buy it. I have been using it ever since. I like it a lot and want to talk about what I like and some of the things that I would like to see in the application.
Why do I need this type of software?
You may be wondering what the point is in having offline blogging software. The main reason is because when I want to write a blog entry I hate having to open the browser, go to the blog, login and make a new entry. I’ve had bad experiences with writing blog posts and emails in the browser window. I am scared to death while I write my post the browser is going to crash! I know a lot of blogging software such as WordPress saves your post while you’re working on it. In my experience though, it’s never enough!
Another reason for offline blogging software is if you are like me and you have multiple blogs, it is really nice to be able to update them all from a convenient location. Currently, I have 4 blogs plugged into MarsEdit. Whenever I need to make a post on one of them I can simply open the application and make the post. Also, if I see a mistake that I have made in my entry it’s so much easier to open MarsEdit, make the change and re-submit instead of having to go to the browser, to the blog, re-login, etc. I can blog much more easily and more often!
What I like about MarsEdit
First of all I have to say I absolutely love the MarsEdit icon! I know I don’t talk about the icons of applications a lot but this is one of my absolute favorite icons. It’s very sexy on my dock!
There are a lot of great features in MarsEdit but there are not a ton of icons cluttering up the application. It’s very simple and clean and I really like that. Instead of having an icon for every little thing there is a drop down menu with a lot of options for inserting HTML or custom tags. I also love the fact that there are keyboard shortcuts for a lot of these, especially the command to paste a link (Option + Command + A).
For each blog you have, you can set up different options. You can choose what warnings you want to receive before your entry is posted; such as warning you if you’ve not set a category or entered a title for your post. You can also choose which services you would like to ping to let the blogging world know that you’ve just made a new entry on your blog.
I also really like the simplicity of the “Save as Draft” button. You click the button as many times as you’d like while you are working on your entry. If you exit the application you can come back and work on it at a later time. But what I really like about it is the fact that whenever I finish the post and I post it to my blog it is no longer in my drafts folder. In my opinion it’s a much better option than using the typical “Save” or “Save As.”
What I’d like to see in MarsEdit
The first change to the application that I would like to see is whenever you are uploading images to your post that the application know which blog you are working on and upload to the appropriate folder.
Using MarsEdit you can choose whether people can leave comments & TrackBacks for your entries. However, you cannot make a password protected post, change the slug, or many of the other things you can do with a WordPress blog.
Although I really love this application and am glad that I made the purchase of it; there is one more thing that I would really like to see added into this application. That is the ability to make new categories. You can select from already created categories but you can’t make new ones (to my knowledge). I have to post the entry and then go to the website and add the proper categories. Granted, I’d have to go to the website anyways to make sure the entry was posted correctly. It would just be really nice not to have to log back in if everything else is correct just to add a category.
I know what you’re probably thinking after reading those two paragraphs above and I’m going to address it right now. Since this application is a cross platform (supports many content management systems) blogging tool; it would be extremely difficult to get every single option that all the blogging platforms offer into the application. I don’t think it would be impossible but it would be difficult because there are always new features to all of these blogging platforms. Also, I am sure there are some limits as to what developers can implement with some blogging systems due to the fact that some systems are closed source.
Do I recommend this application to others?
Yes, I most certainly do recommend it. Since purchasing the application I have blogged a whole lot more because of it. It’s so nice just to be able to open up an application and start blogging. I realize there are other applications out there, even free alternatives. In my opinion none of them can compare to the ease of use of MarsEdit or how fast it works (the others took FOREVER to launch and were very clumsy). MarsEdit offers a LOT of features, I barely scratched the surface! I feel as though my $24.95 was well spent!
MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software
Article update: Wednesday, October 1, 2008: I have updated this article with screen shots from the latest version. I also updated the grammar, at least, I tried to. I have been updating the screen shots on TechButter so that the pages look uniform with the new theme.
The image uploading tool has been improved. You can now specify which blog you are uploading to. When you do open the image uploading tool it connects to the blog you are currently working on. You can now choose from previously uploaded images or images in your catalog. Also, you can connect MarsEdit to Flickr and use images in your account.
The ability to make new categories has been added. Also, you can now change the post slug (what the URL of the post will be). You can also edit the post excerpt and the tags. To my knowledge there is no way to password protect a post using MarsEdit.
I have to be honest with you. Although I really love MarsEdit and have paid for the updated version, I don’t use it as much as I use to. If I were on my Mac more often I probably would. Since getting a new monitor for my PC I’ve been using my Windows machine as my primary workstation again and I post entries to my blog using my web browser. I do think MarsEdit is a great application and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for that type of functionality.