Tag Archives: marsedit

WordPress 2.7

Posted on by

Sure took my sweet time in getting this updated here on the blog. K2 came out with RC7, and updated that too.

I’m in the middle of a switchover process again. I’ll update the blog when that happens. For now, this is all I’ve got.

Definitely digging the new UI and all the new features of the web interface. Wee! I may have to go back to using the web interface, rather than busting out the MarsEdit.

This really should be it’s own version number, but WP doesn’t like version number inflation. Update, people, update!

MarsEdit Feature "Comments"

Posted on by

I’m definitely favoring MarsEdit over Ecto. But as I’m on the subject, I felt the urge to bring to attention some features that would make me love MarsEdit even more. I’m not calling these feature requests, because I can live without most of these. I’m using the app just fine right now.

In No Particular Order

Flickr Uploading/Image Manipulation * Not a big deal, but it could streamline the process. * I’m loving Quicksilver’s Flickr plugin, anyway.

Default “Preview Text Filter” Refer to this tweet. Fixed. * Saves me a couple clicks per post. * All I do is write in Markdown anyway.

Larger Tag Field * One line isn’t enough, and I don’t want to stretch the post window wider than it has to be. Can it grow horizontally?

Default Category Selection * Not a big deal, because I know what is the default one, but I have a feeling xmlrpc.php doesn’t give this information.

Opening Multiple Posts * In the Local Drafts Folder, I want to go back to my workflow quickly by opening all the posts I’m working on. * Also, each post should remember where it was… but I don’t know much about Cocoa… * Heck, implement shortcut-able tabs like TextMate. Then again, this just might be the TextMate user in me.

Better Handling Of Previous Posts * I’d love to be able to have my entire blog locally and have it be stable… I’m very very afraid of hitting refresh right now. * I did it just now to prove a point. My CPU is getting hammered, most likely parsing through all the posts. * and this leads into my next request…

Ability to have a local database of ALL tags * I’ve pulled down 10000 posts to grab the tag data, but it doesn’t seem like tags are not saved from posts that were not posted through MarsEdit. Bummer.

Random Tag Feature Request * If I tagged a post that was not saved or posted, it shouldn’t remember it. Or maybe it should… I feel like this should be modifiable.

Portability * I want to be able to edit on-the-go. The actual drafts are located deep within ~/Library. I would much rather have it saveable to a certain location so I can get at the text files, if needed.

And that’s all for now. I hope Jalkut’s reading, heh. I just used MarsEdit for a week or so, and I’m loving it.

All this Mac application reviewing is making me want to do something in Cocoa. Maybe next week.

TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)

Posted on by

In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.

Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)

Previous Workflow

When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:

  • Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
  • Fill out the text for “Title: “
  • Write the post
  • Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
  • Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)

Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.

Problems With This Workflow

  • Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
  • Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
  • No live preview
  • Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
  • File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)

Features That I Hope To Keep

  • Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
  • Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.

And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.

Meta Meta

Posted on by

It might be of interest that I’m doing this in MarsEdit after a quick run-through of both MarsEdit and Ecto applications. I hope to have a full blog post.

As I was in the shower, I realized how meta all of this became again. I blogged on how I updated WordPress, my blogging software of choice. I am now blogging on the current status of how I’m blogging. I will be blogging on blogging applications for the mac.

Screen One

Screen Two

I took a screen shot and annotated it to show you how crazy it’s becoming. You see how the coding is off to the side, while the blogging insanity continues into the wee hours of the next morning?

This is halfway a test of MarsEdit and halfway an actual post.

Sidenote: After opening this post (which was written in MarsEdit) in Ecto, Ecto has informed me of the dirty HTML MarsEdit was outputting. What is the deal with that?