Comments on: Perfect Preview With MarsEdit

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:07:35 +0000

Howard – as things evolve I’d like to expand the current list of “preview text filters” to add some specific ones that capture most of the nuances of particular blog systems. So for instance I’d like to see a “Blogger Simulator” and a “WordPress Simulator” instead of just “Convert Line Breaks” which is pretty brain-dead.

If anybody gets inspired to start this work and contribute it to me, that might help :)

By: Howard

Howard — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:04:18 +0000

This is another place where Blogger’s convert line breaks confuses things. I have it enabled in my blogger blog and change disable it because it breaks old posts. When creating a new post in MarsEdit I include some line breaks to make a simple list. When posted to Blogger it looks fine because of the inserted BR tags, however the MarsEdit preview isn’t “perfect” because the line breaks aren’t converted.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 06:11:42 +0000

OK, thanks, will do.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:48:59 +0000

Stuart: there isn’t a built-in solution right now to reference “images relative to the final site URL”… something to think about.

The fact that your edited posts are showing up as new posts sounds like a bug, possibly affected by the particulars of what weblog system you’re using, how it’s configured in ME, etc. It would probably be better to raise that question in the forums with some more info about your particular settings:

http://www.red-sweater.com/forums/viewforum.php?id=6

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 07:54:06 +0000

The ability to use a template turns MarsEdit into a divine experience. I can write and see the fully-formatted version almost instantly. Thanks!

Two small glitches: when writing on my local development site, I code in any image links to the local site. But I have to change these for the remote production site. That’s a pain. Is there any magic formula to be able to write the root URL as a piece of code that doesn’t have to be changed? Is that the #weblogURL# referred to in this thread?

And, when I save to a blog and then do some editing, and save again, I’m getting two posts and not one corrected one. Am I doing something wrong?

By: Mo

Mo — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:40:12 +0000

Having recently upgraded to MarsEdit 2 (thanks, by the way—the new features are fantastic), I figured I’d give this a try. I’ve recently been going through Windows-based blogging software for a work project, and was quite impressed by the automatically-templated preview that Windows Live Writer does (I think Adobe Contribute does the same thing).

It would be nice if MarsEdit could do a test post (I’m guessing it would just have to post #body#, with a title of #title#, and so forth, and read it back to build the template itself), but the method you’ve posted here works well enough for me—until I replace all my templates, of course!

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:34:20 +0000

Howard, thanks for following up. I’ll look into it – it’s probably something I can fix for in an update.

By: Howard

Howard — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:32:45 +0000

As for the distinction between #weblogURL# and #url# … it’s probably because you haven’t posted the entry yet, so unfortunately it doesn’t know the URL. Or are you seeing this with already-posted entries as well?

Yes I’m seeing it with already posted entries. #url# acts like #weblogURL#. I’m using blogger.

By: Micah

Micah — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:45:19 +0000

Thanks for writing out the steps. I’ve been evaluating MarsEdit for the last few days, and the perfect preview sold me. My $30 is yours. Keep up the good work!

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:50:39 +0000

Thanks a lot for making me discover this feature which will be hugely useful for me, as the text area on our blog is rather narrow and I always had problems to get images to look right. I tried to solve this by keeping the compose window width the same as the blog area text, but I always ended up in screwing something up. Now it won’t happen anymore :)