MacMembraneThere are peels everywhere…

I recently underwent the self-inflicted misfortune of deleting my MarsEdit preferences folder. Thankfully, MarsEdit is dead simple to set up and so it didn’t take long to remake my blog preview template and re-add my custom markup tags, thus getting things almost exactly as they were before my adventure in stupidity.

I say “almost” here since a single inconsistency of experience annoyingly presented itself after all of my tweaking: MarsEdit’s post preview window would automatically open whenever I began a new post. I am a big fan of the post preview feature of ME, which allows you to see exactly how your post will look on your blog even as you write it offline. For longer articles, though, I generally don’t like to open the preview window until I have the better part of the post written; for shorter, link-based quips I’d rather not bother with it at all. Therefore, having the preview window launch each time I opened the editor soon became a frustrating annoyance. How to turn it off?

I was just about to cry for help on the developer’s forums when I found what I was looking for: MarsEdit’s well-hidden Blog-specific Settings in the Weblog menu. Switch to the “Composing” tab and turn the Post Preview option to “Defaults to Closed.” I was smiling again.

Another gem in these settings is the ability for ME to alert you if you are about to send your post up to the net without filling in the tags section, choosing categories, writing an excerpt, etc (you define what’s important to you). This is a really useful feature that would have saved me many times in the past from hitting send only to quickly realize that I’d left the post “uncategorized.”

I’d consider myself a moderate to heavy MarsEdit user and it thus shocks me somewhat that these settings were so difficult for me to find. There’s enough in these blog sensitive settings that every MarsEdit user would benefit from their being more accessible.