Feb

5

Why I Love MarsEdit

Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I had been planning to write a detailed review of MardEdit but since reading Sean Blank’s excellent review I don’t see the point, he’s done a better job of it than I ever could! So, instead I just want to link to his review and explain why I love Mars Edit.

For me it comes down to four things. Firstly, I want to manage my blog posts in a stand-alone app. I want to be able to command+tab from what ever I’m doing to the blog post I’m working on and I certainly don’t want to have to go searching through my sea of browser tabs and windows to find a post I’m working on. I also want to be dependent on an internet connection to work on my posts. Secondly, the reality is that a text area does not make a good text editor. Another reality is that I have never yet come across a good WYSIWYG HTML editor. MarsEdit does exactly what I want in this regard, it provides a proper text editor with syntax highlighting, spell checking, shortcut keys, and good contextual menus. Not only do I have no issue writing my own markup, I WANT to write my own markup, and the editor provided by MarsEdit is a much nicer place to do it than a text area on a web page. Finally, I like being able to manage multiple blogs from a single place.

Having said that, MarsEdit is not perfect, yet. It’s under active development and the recent 2.1 release already addressed some of the minor issues I had with 2.0. At this stage the biggest issue I have is that MarsEdit doesn’t show the hierarchical relationships between my categories, it just presents me with a flat list. Other than that the only issue I have is that I’d like to be able to control the default markup MarsEdit uses when inserting an image into a post.

All in all I really enjoy using MarsEdit to manage my blog. $29.95 well spent as far as I’m concerned.

[tags]MarsEdit, Blogging[/tags]

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Oct

21

Bleezer Test Post

Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 21, 2007 | 8 Comments

This is a test post from within Bleezer to give it a test run. First impressions are not good. It has messed up my categories because it doesn’t support hierarchical categories, or if it does, it’s buggy as hell with WordPress. The GUI feels typical of free software, it feels crude and un-polished. As a Mac user I’m not at all impressed.

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Sep

27

Posting Blog Comments is a Privilege Not a Right

Filed Under Polemics & Politics, Computers & Tech, My Projects on September 27, 2007 | 10 Comments

There was a time when I was one of those freedom of speech nuts who felt I had a right to stick my ore in everywhere, including the comments on other people’s blogs. You know, confusing the non-existent right not to be edited on other people’s websites with the right to free speech. Thankfully I’ve grown up a bit in recent years. Freedom of speech is very important, absolutely vital, but it does not include a right to effectively deface other people’s expressions of their right to free speech with your own rantings. As long as people are free to set up their own blogs you will have true freedom of speech. Don’t just take my word for that. Far wiser people than I have come to the same conclusions. The following articles make interesting reading:

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