
Daniel, the developer, wrote up instructions here. The process of creating a template is not hard, but takes a little time and some reasonably good HTML skills (the more complex your layout, the harder it is). The problem is that MarsEdit doesn’t know what your blog looks like until you teach it. MarsEdit also offers a Preview window (in addition to the editing window), so you can see what your article will look like when you publish it. There are a bunch of things you can change, including the default Post Status: In this case, you need to select the name of your blog in the main window, click the little gear icon at the bottom of the window, and then choose Edit Settings. It took me a little while to find the right setting, because MarsEdit doesn’t store all its prefs in the same place. You can adjust that by changing the Post Status pop-up menu for each article, or-what I do-change the preferences. The default settings for MarsEdit are for a quick-write-and-post kind of person, so when you hit the Send to Blog button it uploads the article to the blog and publishes it immediately. Instead of asking the user for a URL, this macro simply applies whatever URL is currently on the clipboard. So, for example, I have a custom macro that uses this for the Opening Markup:
MARSEDIT WINDOWS CODE
That #askurl comes from the Insert Placeholder popup menu, where you can tell MarsEdit to ask for a custom URL, or text, or just take whatever is on your clipboard and insert it into the HTML code it uses. No problem! I just opened Format > Custom, clicked the + symbol to add a new format, and made my own using a very intuitive user interface:īecause HTML is all based on opening and closing tags, you can see how you can use this to apply virtually any kind of formatting quickly.ĭid you notice that “insert placeholder” pop-up menu in the screen shot above? That’s the ticket to some even more advanced options when making your own custom formatting macros.įor example, I was complaining to the developer that there is currently no way to apply a hyperlink with the instruction to open in a new window, and he wrote back that a) it’s on his roadmap to add and b) in the meantime, perhaps I could try making a custom macro with the Opening Markup:Īnd the Closing Markup would just be of course. Sometimes I need to apply strike-thru formatting, but that doesn’t come built-in to MarsEdit. That opens the Formatting Macros panel:įrom here, you can double-click a format to give it a shortcut. You can apply shortcuts to almost any kind of formatting by choosing Format > Customize. I use Heading 3 a lot, so I made my own shortcut to apply it. Of course, MarsEdit isn’t perfect out of the box-there are a few things you can do to help make it better (in my opinion), by editing preferences and creating some custom macros.

When I have a problem (which is very rare), the developer is very responsive.I can write and post to all the different sites I’m involved with (I help manage 7 WordPress blogs) from the same place.If I am online, MarsEdit can “see” my pages and posts on my blog and I can edit them and then repost the changes!.I can quickly switch between Rich Text View and HTML view if I need to tweak the code.

I can use drag and drop to place images into an article, and MarsEdit handles the media uploads.I can noodle on a post for as long as I need to, even if that means I’m writing in the back of a taxi or on an airplane.But I just use WordPress for everything.) (I say “CMS” because the MarsEdit web site says it “works with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type and any blog that supports a standard MetaWeblog or AtomPub interface.” I tried it with Drupal and could never get it to work properly.

I can type, format, edit, change categories, add images, and more-and I don’t need to be logged in to my CMS.
MARSEDIT WINDOWS OFFLINE
MarsEdit is an offline blog post editor, which means I’m sitting here typing in it, not caring whether I’m connected to the internet. I don’t usually tell people what to do, but I’ll make an exception in this case: If you write a blog or write articles for a web site based on WordPress, and you use a Mac, you should use MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software.
