Another Step into the Blogsphere: Evaluation of MarsEdit

Okay, when I first started this blogging thing, I really only had a toe in the water. I don't post very often and have kept the posts to family-related announcements. Well, in an effort to add more useless stuff to the world-wide web I'm going to try using a couple of blog clients on my desktop in an effort to write more often. I know, it's not the tool, it's he who wields it.

The first client I'm trying is a demo version of MarEdit from Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire, popular RSS Aggregator for Mac OS X. The initial impression is "not bad". It took a bit of time to connect to my Drupal-based blog. I quickly fixed the connection problem after a quick look at the MarsEdit's documentation and a helpful post from James Walkah titled Using drupal's blogapi with MarsEdit.

I've been content to author blog entries through the web form that Drupal provides. The form works relatively well and there's even a spell check module. But if you really want to catch those spelling mistakes, Drupal's web form and spell check module is nothing compared to MarsEdit's ability to underline spelling errors as they're typed. It's odd, however, that MarsEdit doesn't recognize these three words: blog, MarsEdit, and NetNewsWire.

I have disabled HTML code in my install of Drupal and primarily use Textile to format text, create links, and reference images. Textile is not supported by MarsEdit out of the box, but it can easily be added by adding Textile markup under the Custom Tags menu. I will give MarsEdit a more thorough test and will report on my finding in a later post. I also plan on downloading ecto for a drive around the blogging block. Let me know what your favorite blogging service/site is, which blogging clients you use, and why.