These last few posts have been created with MarsEdit for the Mac. As a general rule I don’t like using web-based editing tools as my primary method for writing posts. Once I switched my blog over to WordPress a few months ago, I decided to look for an application that I could use to manage my blog. I read several reviews and blog posts talking about different options and finally settled on MarsEdit. It seemed to be the best organized and have the best feel of any that I tried–so I purchased it.
After completely screwing up the formatting of a couple of posts, I realized that it doesn’t convert the line breaks that I’d inserted into its editor window into HTML paragraph tags. Sure it gives you a combo box at the top to insert “markup”. Guess that what does….yep, you guessed it, it inserts html <p></p> around what you have selected. What is up with that?!? I might as well code the silly post by hand in TextEdit or write the thing in Dreamweaver. At least Dreamweaver will write the basic HTML code for you.
Those of you that read my blog (yes both of you) might be saying “But you’re a web developer. You know HTML. Quit your griping”. You’d be correct in those statements. My issue is that I shouldn’t HAVE to write my own HTML. If you market something as a tool to publish to a web site (blogs included), it stands to reason that you should include the functionality to convert regular typed text into HTML so it would be displayed correctly on the web.
I very well have wasted my $39 or whatever the cost of the program was but I’m seriously considering dumping MarsEdit and looking for something else. I am going to invest a little time to see what kind of support forums they have. So far I have not taken the time to do that, so my rant may be premature.
Anyone have any recommendations for a well-designed Mac application for managing a WordPress blog?