MarsEdit - Premier Desktop Blogging Client for the Mac

MarsEdit is a Mac-only blogging client with a host of excellent features and a beautifully simple user interface. I’ve been using MarsEdit exclusively over the past months and have really fallen for its easy to navigate features and minimalistic design. For me, MarsEdit is far and away the best blogging client for the Mac. From its easy setup to its Flickr integration, its worthy html handling to its post preview window, MarsEdit has become the premier tool in my blogging armory.

Below are a few of the reasons MarsEdit has become so important to me as a blogger. If you’re not sure how blogging from a dedicated application instead of a browser based editor can improve your relationship with your blog, then you might want to read this first. Once you’ve decided to make the switch, MarsEdit will completely change the way you interact with your blog.

Effortless Setup

Everyone knows that first impressions carry a lot of weight in the evaluation of personal relationships, and the same, I think, is true for software. Getting started with MarsEdit couldn’t be easier. The first time you launch the application, MarsEdit asks for your blog’s title and url. Then a second prompt screen appears where you enter your user name and password (both of which are thereafter saved in OS X’s keychain). MarsEdit then downloads your blog settings, categories, tags and your recent posts (the number of posts is equivalent to the number you’ve set for new RSS subscribers in your blog’s preferences). Voilà! You’re now up and running with MarsEdit.

Html Only Editor

Writing in MarsEdit is done exclusively from within an html text editor. Formatting your text with html tags gives you complete control over the presentation of your content. You know exactly what will be published and, as you become familiar with html, exactly how a web browser will interpret it. In my experience, WYSIWYG editors are all somewhat random and idiosyncratic in how they pass your markup on to the published database. With MarsEdit, no guesswork is required. Once you leave behind the clumsy but familiar interface of the WYSIWYG editor, you’ll come to love the transparency of writing in markup. Html editing gives you as much control over the presentation of your writing as you have over its content.

Adding the necessary html tags to your body of writing in MarsEdit is nearly trivial. Instead of entering each unique text element by hand, a drop-down list in the toolbar gives you easy access to an ample assortment of popular markup tags and adds them for you as you select them from the list. If you’re the kind of writer who doesn’t like to take their hands off the keyboard as you write, you can assign shortcuts to any of the tags that you access frequently. And of course, you’re not limited to the default list. MarsEdit lets you add new tags via a familiar Mac-like tag management window which gives you access to both the opening and closing parameters of all your tags.

I had little to no experience with html before I started using MarsEdit to publish to my blog, but the application made the transition from a WYSIWYG editor an easy one, and I have learned a great deal along the way. If you’ve published using only a WYSIWYG editor up until now, the absence of such an environment does take a bit of getting used to, but once you begin using a markup based editor to publish your posts, it won’t be long until you begin to take advantage of its power in the presentation of your words.

Perfect Preview

MarsEdit may lack a WYSIWYG post editor, but its Perfect Preview feature allows you to view your unpublished writings locally exactly as they will appear on your blog and even gives you real-time feedback as you write and add html tags to your content. It’s the closest thing you can get to writing your posts on the actual webpage of your online blog. Perfect Preview will particularly benefit bloggers who use a lot of images or other non-textural elements in their posts, giving them an exact preview of how their content will appear once published. WYSIWYG editors can’t compare.

In Perfect Preview you see your text and embedded images bend to your formatting in real-time. The feature is perhaps the greatest single draw of publishing from MarsEdit. Taking full advantage of the feature does require a bit of set up, however, but getting it running isn’t at all difficult. All of the details of the process are fully explained in the application’s Help viewer, or you can read this helpful post on the developer’s website. After using Perfect Preview to proof your unpublished posts, you’ll have a hard time living without it.

Image Uploading and Access

Images enhance the feel of long blog posts, and many times a notable image itself of worth a trip to the blog editor. MarsEdit makes it simple to upload images to your free or self-hosted blog. Drag an image onto the media window, click upload and in a few seconds you have the option of embedding the image into your posts aligned or free. Moreover, MarsEdit creates a local thumbnail archive of all you’re previously uploaded images and their URLs, so if you’re writing a new post down the road you can quickly search your uploads and, once you’ve found the one you want, repost it instantly.

Having all of your new and previously uploaded images available to you in MarsEdit makes it easy to integrate visual elements into all of your blog posts. But MarsEdit also supports the community based online photo service Flickr. Authorizing MarsEdit to work with Flickr is an easy two-step affair, and once you do so you can access all of your uploads from within the app itself. If you have a Flickr account and take advantage of their excellent image hosting, MarsEdit’s Flickr integration is a real time saver.

Support for Multiple Blogs Across Many Platforms

Blogging is entirely a hobby for me. But, for whatever reason, I’m now the sole administrator for three blogs which I regularly publish to as well as a few other more specialized sites. MarsEdit serves me handsomely as the headquarters for my entire blogging empire. MarsEdit lets you publish to as many blogs as you like and organizes them in a familiar Mail.app interface. As you scroll through past posts in any blog in the main window, you can see your posts rendered identically to how others see them online. Your uploads to any individual blog are accessible from every other, so if the focus of your multiple blogs overlaps at all, you don’t need to reupload the same image to post it on more than one of your blogs. And adding additional blogs to MarsEdit is trivially easy, even if they all employ different blogging software.

If you have multiple blogs, MarsEdit is without a doubt the easiest way to manage and publish to them from one central location.

It’s in the Details

The minimalist post editor, Perfect Preview, the convenient image and resource handling and the ability to manage a ton of blogs are the flagship features of MarsEdit. But for any application, and especially one that addresses some important aspect of your computing life, it’s all about the details, and MarsEdit really delivers on these. A bookmarklet to post from your web-browser that is intelligent about highlighted text, smart searching of your posts and uploads and auto-completion of tags are just a few. You can edit the post slug of your published piece, toggle both comment and track back acceptance for individual posts, add categories on the fly, write excerpts and even send a post up to the server as a draft. For power users, MarsEdit also lets you edit posts externally in your editor of choice (BBEdit, for example) and the application has extensive Apple Script support, so, even if you can’t do everything you’d like with the application out of the box, adding it only takes a bit of coding know-how.

The fit and finish of MarsEdit puts it in the highest class of Mac applications of any category - it’s rock solid and extremely fast. As with any application that you spend a significant amount of time in, I do have some requests for future releases, as well as some small whines here and there, but none of these detracts significantly from the experience MarsEdit provides. Moreover, from what I can tell, the developer is 100% committed to the application, so it’s only going to get better in the future.

Download MarsEdit. It has changed the way that I think about writing for the internet.