Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within an email. If Blogger, WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer.
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| MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac.
Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail and then format the blog entries within Blogger. This meant simple things such as italicizing titles or formatting words in bold required rereading each blog entry.
A greater challenge exists with images, which always seemed to be converted to a small size. Unfortunately, it does seem to be a problem with Blogger as a platform.
NOTE:
I was correct that images posed a problem, with the images I included within MarsEdit not making the move to Blogger. Repeated attempts to include images failed, even as MarsEdit’s media browser displays a screenshot from itself as uploaded.
It is my hope that MarsEdit reduces my time formatting blog entries.
Admittedly, I have chosen to remain with Google’s aging platform instead of migrating to WordPress at this time. MarsEdit appears to be well suited to WordPress, with support for features found within that dominant blogging platform. For example, the tags and categories permitted by WordPress are nicely implemented within MarsEdit. Likewise, media features within MarsEdit directly support WordPress.
With blog entries dating back to 2004, migrating to another server and URL might reduce traffic to my blogs. However, there are clear benefits to migrating at some point in the future if I wish to use tools like MarsEdit and increase revenues with more flexible ad services.
Dictating into MarsEdit with Dragon speech recognition proved to be painless. MarsEdit works flawlessly with Dragon and the macOS language tools. Spell checking and grammar checking works properly within the edit window.
The ability to compose blog entries off-line and having a complete archive of entries are important features to me. The ability to compose entries and post them promptly without having to reformat blog entry drafts would be nice.
Red Sweater Software generously offers a 14-day trial. Over the next two weeks, I hope to determine if I should adopt MarsEdit in place of Apple Mail. I will need to learn how to schedule blogs and if some features can be implemented with minimal hassles, such as advertising links and Amazon links within blog posts.