Success with Web-Browser-Free Blogging
It worked! Nice. I even timestamped it, as I am doing with this one, which should appear minutes later.
What all can I do?
I can write my post. I can preview it. And I can publish it. All without ever opening up my WordPress blog in a web browser. And, yes, MarsEdit works with other blogs too. (I learned about MarsEdit from a post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.)
I can also use various markup tags, as I could in WordPress. The only thing is that I haven’t yet found where I can do ordered and unordered lists, at least by default. But, I can manually enter markup tags and then call them when needed. Nice.
I can choose my category as well, which is essential. I can choose to leave comments open or close them, as well as to decide whether or not to accept trackbacks.
I can also add Technorati tags and edit the date, as I mentioned previously. Just like in WordPress, if you edit the date to a future time, that’s when your post will be published.
I can add images as well, but I haven’t tried that yet.
I have about 27 days or so left on the free trial, but it’s looking good so far!
I’ve heard good things about Marsedit, but I’m afraid to use it. My new design is so freaking customized, I’m afraid I’ll crash my site with it.
Has your design affected your administration panel at all? From what I can tell, all MarsEdit does is login to your site and uploads the post to where ever your post would normally go. For example, when I submitted my first post from MarsEdit to this blog, I set the timestamp so it wouldn’t publish right away. I then logged into the blog, and the post was there waiting to be published just as though I had written it directly in WordPress.
There were some minor issues with line spacing, which only seems to be a problem when I use smilies. Other than that, it seemed fine.
Of course, I am not going to guarantee you won’t have problems, but I don’t see why you would. If you’re worried, make a backup of your blog before giving MarsEdit a try.
Pete - the way MarsEdit works is through a very specific interface provided by your blog, to get content into your blog’s database. It’s not really concerned at all with the design. The idea is all the design is on your blog for presentation in the browser. But MarsEdit just pops the content in, for most people a lot faster and easier than you can do it through the web admin panel.
All in all I’d say trying MarsEdit is a very safe thing to do. Still, it’s never a bad idea to do a backup first if you’re at all concerned.
Daniel
I guess I’m concerned that it won’t handle the custom fields and NextGen photo gallery I’m running. I guess the only way to find out is backup and go for it.
I had seen something similar in Microsoft Word, but never used it because I always keep my browser open with Wordpress logged in.