MarsEdit: Blogging Done Right

MarsEdit is one of those applications that you don’t think you will ever really need, but after you use it, you can’t live without it. MarsEdit is a desktop blogging application that uses the power of your Mac, to provide you with an amazing blogging experience.

MarsEdit 2 is miles ahead of its inaugural release. Most of the bugs found in the previous version are now gone, and now it is more powerful, and easier to use than ever. Still, you may say, what is the benefit of using a desktop client for blogging, when you can use free, online alternatives? What does MarsEdit offer that no other online service offers?

MarsEdit makes it remarkably easy to manage posts and edits for multiple blogs. Before I heard about MarsEdit, I would have all my blogs in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar, and I would have to click each one and log in, in order to see if there were any new posts written, or if I wanted to edit something. Now, I am just a click away from MarsEdit, where I can check and edit all of my blogs at once. MarsEdit downloads the text and images very quickly, so that you can even blog and edit posts while you are offline, which is great for a laptop user. As soon as you reconnect to the internet, you can send all of your edits and posts to the internet. But enough of me talking about how great it is. Let me show you how easy it is to use.

One of the most amazing things about Marsedit, is it’s Quick Start window. The first time you open the application, you are prompted to enter in the name of your blog, along with the URL, and MarsEdit will immediately chug away, configuring all the settings for your blog. It will do this automatically as long as your blog is built on one of the more popular blogging platforms. MarsEdit works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, Vox, and countless others. After you provide your username and password, MarsEdit is all set up.

The main interface for MarsEdit is simple, and easy-to-use. Your blogs show up on the left, much like mailboxes in Apple Mail, and you can browse through the posts for certain blogs. To see if there are any new posts, all it takes is a simple tap of the Refresh button. You can also manage the posts on your blogs very easily, through a simple click of the Edit, Delete, or New buttons in the toolbar.

The actual editing window of MarsEdit provides all of the features of a standard, web-based blog editor and more. You edit the blog in standard HTML, which requires that you know some HTML basics. Aside from that, however, everything else is simple and intuitive. A click of the Options button presents you with the Categories from the server, in which you can place your post. You can choose which weblog you want to write for from the drop-down menu, and get a full, live preview of your blog post in a separate window. If you have a favorite text editor such as BBEdit or TextMate, MarsEdit integrates with them, and allows you to do your writing in a separate application. MarsEdit works by saving drafts of blogs you are working on locally on the computer, which allows you to edit offline, and only requires you to have an internet connection when you publish your post. MarsEdit also contains a cool Media Unloader that will upload the media to the web, and automatically embed the HTML into your post. The Media Manager can also integrate with your Flickr account.

While MarsEdit does have a beautiful interface, and has some awesome features, I find that the overall UI is too “Window-y”. There are too many windows that open, and need to be seen, and it makes it hard for MarsEdit to be used on Macs with small displays. However, even with this slight user interface flaw, MarsEdit still beats all of the online blogging solutions hands-down. With it’s strong feature-set, ability to manage multiple blogs from one dedicated app, and offline freedom, MarsEdit is an app that is completely worth it’s $29.95 pricetag, and will make any blogger more productive, more creative, and more involved with their blog.