I’ve tried a number of blog editors, such as Ecto and a couple of others, and none offered enough value for me to switch away from typing posts directly into the standard MovableType textentry form. Occasionally, I’ll edit using BbEdit, but that’s rare.
I’ve been hearing enough about MarsEdit, a new blog editor from the folks who brought us NetNewsWire, (arguably the best RSS reader on the planet), that I wanted to give it a try; here goes!
ObRealContent:
Driving on Icy Roads
Stop signs are advisory, due to the practical matter that a car may not be able to stop, sign or no sign.
When two vehicles are approaching an intersection both should slow, and the one that CAN stop, should.
If you realize you are going to slide right through a stop sign, it may be better to speed up and get through the intersection as fast as possible. This depends on oncoming traffic, of course.
Don’t blame me if you follow the above and get a ticket; your milage may vary and all that; no warranty express or implied.
Oh, also … when driving through town and you see a vehicle stuck at the side of the road, get out and help push. Try to avoid getting run over by the vehicle as it rocks back and forth trying to get unstuck.
The first time, a couple of days ago, we loaded 100 pounds of salt from our car to his truck, plus all of me and eventually he got free. Today, people from 3 different cars stopped to help one car get free, and it momentarily got stuck again as it pulled away, but eventually did take off.
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Ahh, built-in spell checker; that’s nice. I don’t usually misspell words, but do make typos. I’ll go ahead and preview and post this, and maybe try posting an image next time.
Well, I sure am used to MT’s auto-formatting based on whitespace (carriage returns). Hmm, how can I fix this quickly, w/out just pasting into an MT window? I have to highlight each paragraph, and manually add the HTML paragraph tags. I guess I expected this to be a bit more WYSIWYG though the live preview is better than MT’s, that’s for sure.
The ability to select multiple categories is nice, as is the ability to set the comment options on a per post basis (though I don’t think I’ll use that feature). It is annoying to have to remember to add the para tags after years of having them auto-generated. Other than that, I think I like this, and the price is right; it’s part of NetNewsWire.
The “paste link” function is very nice, as I just discovered when adding the links to this post.
Bummer. It seems that like before, when posting w/one of these blog editors, the site doesn’t get rebuilt. In addition, w/MarsEdit, I can’t figure out which, if any sites will be pinged when I post. I guess I’m not likely to fix what isn’t broken, so I’ll continue to type into MT’s textentry boxes and use BbEdit as needed. NetNewsWire still rocks, though!
Hi Mike — thanks for checking out MarsEdit!
About the whitespace formatting — you can tell MarsEdit to have MT convert line breaks for you, so whitespace is treated the way you expect. In other words, you don’t have to manually add paragraph tags.
Here’s how:
1. In a post you’re writing or editing, click the Options button in the toolbar.
2. In the options drawer, in the Formatting popup menu, choose Convert Line Breaks.
You can also tell MarsEdit to make this a default for all new posts so you don’t have to repeat the above every time. Here’s how:
1. In the weblogs drawer in the main window, double-click your weblog.
2. In the settings window that appears, click the Defaults tab.
3. In the Formatting popup menu, choose Convert Line Breaks.
4. Click OK.
Now, about the site being rebuilt: the affected pages *should* get rebuilt when you send a new or edited post to your weblog. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a bug.
About what sites get pinged: there’s a Pings tab in the settings window where you can choose what sites get pinged. Double-click your weblog in the weblogs drawer and click on the Pings tab.