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MarsEdit Part 2

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MarsEdit and Blogger are not cooperating, and I’m uncertain if I will use MarsEdit past the trail period. Currently, what the application offers me is a way to compose drafts outside of Apple Mail, but it isn’t offering me much more than that because I use Google’s blogging platform.

Annoyances that require using a menu choice, instead of the Option pane:

  • Date should be included with “Post Status” for scheduling purposes.
  • Enclosure settings should be within the editor window, along with Title.
  • Bullet lists should be a default formatting choice, as they are common.
More serious annoyances:
  • Paragraphs require two blank lines, even in Rich Text mode, or you must clean the code within Blogger.
  • Images do not function properly, no matter how many experiments I have tried. 
I’m not saving much time if I still need to carefully format a post in Blogger and insert images from within Google’s interface.

MarsEdit prefers WordPress, without a doubt. For Blogger, MarsEdit confusingly uses Categories as Tags, and Tags are left blank. If you attempt to migrate, I’m wondering if information is remapped properly or if you then have to fix the post categories and tag. Often, plug-ins exist for such migration hassles. I’d probably migrate outside MarsEdit and simply recreate the accounts in the editor.

I do not like the annoying two-returns as I would in a plaintext editor. Surely there is an easier way to fix the translation of paragraph to two breaks. Though this is a Blogger problem, it is well-known and an external editor should handle the improper but long-standing Blogger method.

It might be worth migrating five of my six blogs to WordPress, if I anticipated more readers and some income. As it is, blogging remains an outlet more than anything. It is a place to store my thoughts. MarsEdit reminds me that Blogger should have been updated years ago to something like Medium or a stripped-down WordPress.

I have too much content to migrate without some planning and effort. Ideally, MarsEdit would adapt, but I assume most of its users are loyal to WordPress.
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