The most exciting internet trend of the past few years is the return of the blog. People are posting again. It’s great.
I’m using “blog” a bit more loosely than in the past. The great revival has taken many shapes—email newsletters, for example, remind me a lot of the early days of blogging. But I’ve also noticed, in our post-Twitter, post-Facebook social media hellscape, more people seem to be starting websites, and publishing their thoughts on websites they own. I’ve certainly gone back to using my personal blog more often since setting up WordPress’ Fediverse integration—I have an active comments section for the first time in over a decade, and I love it.
The problem, as a creator, is that writing, editing, and submitting articles in the web version of WordPress is kind of a drag. I generally prefer using local applications that are actually on my computer whenever possible, which is why I was thrilled to find Marsedit. This is a beautiful Mac application that makes managing a blog a lot easier. It’s faster than loading up WordPress, for one thing, and it integrates nicely with my operating system.
Open the application and you’ll be asked to add your blog URLs—you can add as many as you like. Do so, and you’ll see all of your posts and pages in one place.
Credit: Justin Pot
Marsedit works with most blogging platforms
I’ve been testing MarsEdit on my WordPress site, but it also works with Micro.blog, Tumblr, TypePad and Movable Type, along with any service blog that supports a standard MetaWeblog or AtomPub interface.
In addition to providing a clean interface to draft posts, adding images is great—the app integrates with both Apple Photos and local folders on your computer. You can set the size and remove metadata in just a few clicks. Again, it’s a lot faster than finding an image and uploading it to WordPress, in my experience.
Credit: Justin Pot
More flexible than most blogging platforms
There are a few more features worth pointing out. If you’re a Markdown user, you can write your posts using that, which is something most blogging systems don’t offer—and Marsedit even supports syntax highlighting (if you know, you know). And you can write and save your posts completely offline, which is obviously something you can’t do in a browser.
The application isn’t perfect. I haven’t found a way to use it to manage comments, which is disappointing—if that was supported, I’d rarely need to open WordPress at all. For writing, posting, and editing, though, it does everything I need it to do.
MarsEdit costs $59.95 as a one-time purchase, or $10/month as part of Setapp, a bundle that includes a bunch more popular apps. Whether this is worth the price or not depends on how often you blog. I’m back at it, and consider the app a bargain.
