Maintaining three Wordpress based blogs doesn’t leave me much time to post as much as I used to. While I remain very happy with Wordpress overall, the number of steps required to actually post content is time-consuming, clumsy, and, often times, too darn slow.

After “dealing with it” for a few months, I started to look around for options. Surely there was a Mac application out there that would greatly facilitate the process of posting new content, in ways only Wordpress could dream about.

Enter MARSedit 2.

The developers behind MARSedit 2, Red Sweater Software, are the same folks behind the stellar NetNewsWire RSS reader (now owned by NewsGator).

MARSedit 2 allows you to create profiles for as many blogs as you post content to. This powerful blog publishing app supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, Drupal and Vox out if the box.

You can see a preview of how your post will look when published thanks to handy, auto-updating preview pane, so there are no surprises in the what-you-see-is-what-you-get department.

Adding images is a matter of dragging and dropping the images. The one thing about this feature that wasn’t clear in the documentation (at least the online documentation) was where the image files are stored when uploaded. Thankfully, a quick Google search helped me find the answer.

You don’t need to know HTML to add links to images and text in your blog post. On the upper left side is a pull-down menu called Markup where you can specify that, and a host of other commonly used HTML items (div tags, bold, italics, etc.). Adding links is also really easy - if you’ve already copied the link it automatically populates the ‘add link’ text field, saving the extra step of pasting it in. The pull-down menu is great for novice HTML’rs, but I prefer to hand-code as I type, and MARSedit 2 lets you do that, too.

I mostly post image content from my Flickr site, and was pleasantly surprised to find Flickr support built-in to the app. Way cool.

Many times when writing long blog posts using Wordpress’s built-in ‘write post’ feature, you’ll have to put up with a small post window that (in some browsers) cannot be scaled. This was always a point of aggravation for me, and MARSedit lets you make your post window as large as you want (nice on a 30″ display).

The added bonus - no need to worry about losing that lengthy blog post when your browser freezes. This has happened to me on a few occasions. With MARSedit, I’m no longer at my browser’s mercy.

Also, any categories you’ve setup through your Wordpress blog show up in a Categories pane, conveniently placed on the right half of the app window.

I’ve played with MARSedit 2 for about a week before registering the program. If you maintain a number of blogs, MARSedit is worth it for the convenience factor alone. Is it perfect? No, and I’ll touch on the annoyances after I’ve had a chance to field test it for a few months.

MARSedit is currently at version 2.1.3. and is priced at $29.95. You can try the program out for 30 days to see if it’s your cup o’ tea. There are upgrade discounts available to folks who already have the first incarnation of the program.

Would I buy it? Yes. The time I save now using this program made the purchase well worth it.

-Krishna

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 9:05 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.