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rickdude

Hi, one of the reasons I like using MarsEdit is that it serves as an offline archive of previous posts. This is good not only for occasions when I'm offline for a while, but also for blogs that I lose access to permanently (I'm thinking of Vox). But I just noticed with one of my WordPress.com blogs that MarsEdit has stored recent posts (up to about 10 months ago) but nothing really old. Is there any particular reason for this, and is there any way to make it suck in all posts from a blog?

Daniel Jalkut

Hi there -

Unfortunately MarsEdit is not really suitable as a "whole blog" archiver or downloader right now. This is mostly due to limitations in most of the blog systems "API" through which MarsEdit communicates.

The problem stems from the fact that when you "refresh" in MarsEdit, most systems only let it as for the "last N posts" where N is usually best set to something like 30, for speed and efficiency of the refresh.

You can experiment with setting the number of posts to much larger, but it may cause a very slow refresh as MarsEdit tries to download all the posts. For some blog systems a very larger number may actually cause the blog server to fail to refresh and MarsEdit will present an error.

The number of posts to set is settable under the blog's settings in MarsEdit, under "General."

In general I can't recommend using MarsEdit as an archival tool. I recommend getting in the habit of "exporting" from your blog of choice using whatever exporter or backup system they (hopefully!) provide. I'm considering archival-type functionality in the future, but some of this may depend on getting improvements made to the current "API" that the various systems offer.

Daniel

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