Comments on: I’d Tumbl For You

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:44:22 +0000

lauredhel : thanks for the additional feedback. As usual, I find myself hung up on wanting to do “all or nothing” with support for these systems. It is sounding more and more like a nice priority feature would be to support these security values. If I can figure out a way to efficiently add this to the product sooner, I will do it.

By: lauredhel

lauredhel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:13:38 +0000

+1 for LiveJournal here.

A hearty +1 from me, too.

In all honesty, the only thing I really miss is per-post security settings

And a +1 on this. A friendslock option is by far the most important thing, and is the only reason I keep XJournal lying around. All the tags and such, I can just create custom markup for.

My two most-desired features are an LJ friendslock, and the ability to arrange drafts into folders.

By: Tommy

Tommy — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:38:00 +0000

For any microbloggers out there, Publr just implemented the microblog api and can now receive posts with MarsEdit.

By: Mo

Mo — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:47:25 +0000

+1 for LiveJournal here. For some reason, I assumed the current level of support for LJ was as good as it could reasonably get, and so didn’t really bother asking for anything more. In all honesty, the only thing I really miss is per-post security settings—I know what the tags are, and compose plain HTML anyway, and I’m not really bothered by autodetection of what’s currently playing in iTunes and the like, but security’s the one which keeps me from using MarsEdit for LJ.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:01:38 +0000

Hi Watts – thanks for the feedback. You know, I do still have ambitions to further improve the LJ support in MarsEdit, but I have to be honest and admit that the demand is diminishing and seems likely to continue to do so. I don’t know if it’s because of the sale of LJ, or because of the upsurge in popularity among Blogger, WordPress, and newer sites like Tumblr, but the number of people actively using LJ and asking for MarsEdit support has dropped significantly.

I realize this could be a situation where they stop asking because they’re not getting. But my feeling is that there are far fewer people these days who are using LJ and who would like to have support in a native client like MarsEdit.

Of course, I’d like to support everything as well as possible, but I always have to pick the highest priorities and try to chip away at them one at a time.

Daniel

By: Watts

Watts — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:56:43 +0000

I’m going to gently tweak you a little here. :) I’m a registered MarsEdit owner but don’t use it much because my main blogging platform is LiveJournal.

Okay, MarsEdit supports LiveJournal. Sorta kinda. But, well, not really. I know from past comments you were waiting for them to get their Atom publishing system done, but… I’m not sure I’d keep waiting.

The thing is, the state of LJ-specific blogging clients on OS X is bad. Really bad. As bad as you may think I mean? No, it’s worse than that. The ones I can find are all buggier than a South American jungle and are, for practical purposes, abandonware. I’ve ended up writing in TextMate in Markdown, converting to HTML and pasting stuff into LJ’s web interface directly.

I’m aware LJ support is non-trivial; it has a lot of metadata compared to some other blogging systems, not to mention LJ-specific tags most clients support. (I wrote a little LJ API interface in Ruby years ago to let me post directly to LJ from Emacs.) And I suspect to sell to LJ users MarsEdit will have to support all of that metadata — even though it’d be competing against abandonware, it’s *free* abandonware. But if it did, it might well be worth it for a fair number of people.

By: Billigflüge San Fransico

Billigflüge San Fransico — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:47:38 +0000

@Marc
Iam be afraid the developers will do special´s for Tumblr…

;)

By: Marc

Marc — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:24:34 +0000

I still hope Tumblr moves to a standard API rather than just fix the existing one.

It would ease my mind to know that developers do not have to do anything special for Tumblr when they add new features to their blog editing software.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:08:49 +0000

Steve: I guess you’re suggesting I could have used a screen-scraping approach to mask the absence of API access.

To answer your question, the reason I didn’t do that is because I have enough work to do just trying to support systems with relatively well-behaved APIs. It makes a lot more sense more sense in situations like this for the service to do a little work in order to prevent the clients having to do an unbearable amount of work.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:08:38 +0000

Why didn’t you use WebKit to get you the last 20% of the way there? There are a number of tools in that framework that could solve all of the problems you mentioned and any further ones. I know that it’s a bit of a kludge to maintain, but you can solve that with automated testing.

There’s a difference between “not in the API” and “not possible”.