Trying out MarsEdit

In one of the podcasts I listen to, I heard an interview with the guy who writes MarsEdit - a blog publishing tool for the mac. I figured I would try it out. This post is written in Mars Edit. The hookup to blogs.sun.com was pretty easy - MarsEdit wasn't able to auto-detect the blogger interface, but when I indicated manually that the blog was MetaWebLog compatible - it did all the right stuff. I can insert images using MarsEdit as well. Here's a picture I took of an offline recommender system at a bookstore. IMG_0138.jpg

(By the way, this picture shows that even human-based recommender systems can get really wonky - this bookstore suggests that if you like 'Collapse' you may also like "I am Legend" - sure they are books about similar topics ... but they seem to me to be about as similar as Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" and "The Hobbit".)

I shall try to use MarsEdit for a few blog posts over the next month or so during the trial period to see if it is worth the $30.

Well - after posting here are a few impressions - I was hoping that MarsEdit would scale the image properly. Also, I'm surprised that the editing is not WYSIWYG - it is back to inserting html tags in the post, how last decade. Perhaps there are some setting that I can change to make this work better for me. So far, I'm not excited enough to part with $30

Posted on: Apr 15, 2008

Posted by: plamere

Category: General

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Comments:

I've heard lots of positive stuff about MarsEdit, and Daniel who's the developer, has a really nice blog (http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/) where you can follow the progress of the application.

[Off the topic: I guess that the space character between Mars and Edit in your post is a typo?]

Posted by Mattias on April 15, 2008 at 09:52 AM EDT #

Thanks Mattias, I've fixed the MarsEdit typo and amd now reading Daniel's blog.

Posted by Paul on April 15, 2008 at 10:32 AM EDT #

Thanks for giving MarsEdit a spin. Your reactions to the lack of image scaling and WYSIWYG are understandable. Both of these items are on my "TODO list" so to speak, although the list is pretty long :)

For my thoughts on WYSIWYG in particular:

http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/faq.html

Daniel

Posted by Daniel Jalkut on April 15, 2008 at 11:56 AM EDT #

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