NewsGator subscriber counts

NewsGator subscriber counts –

Greg Reinacker explains the skinny on how NewsGator subscriber (and NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go!) counts are reported. Basically saying that if you sync your newsreaders then your subscriber count is reported to FeedBurner as one person using NewsGator online.

Before this I tought that individual apps were pinging in addition to the NewsGator online count, and therefore skewing the actual numbers; but that’s not true.

For example, yesterday my FeedBurner stats report 445 subscribers use NetNewsWire and 739 use NewsGator Online. According to Greg, there is no overlap of users in those numbers; 445 subscribers only use NNW on one computer and 739 use more than one computer with syncing turned on. Of course, you always have to take subscriber numbers with a grain of salt. It would be easy for someone with more than one mac to not have syncing turned on, thus counting as two subscribers when they’re actually just one.

NewsGator subscriber counts

NNW hack – Show web page instead of feed

Oliver Boermans put together a style sheet hack for NetNewsWire which will show the actual web page for an article instead of just its contents.

I think articles should be read in context to the design of the site they’re published on. It’s like art: looking at a picture a painting is not quite the same as looking at the painting itself. When I checking through NNW and come across an article I’d like to read I’ll arrow out to the article’s permalink and read on the site. Ollie’s little hack may be a good solution for those who insist on doing 100% of their reading directly in NetNewsWire (and who don’t like to use NNW’s tabbed browsing).

NNW hack – Show web page instead of feed

Joe Posnanski: The Last Second

The Last Second –

Joe Posnanski:

I was thinking that since New England football coach Bill Belichick missed the final second of Super Bowl XLII, since he had already stormed off the field* in what we back in high school might have described as a “hissy fit,” he might want a quick recap. Here’s what happened

Even if you didn’t watch the game, and even if you don’t like football read Joe’s post. You’ll like it.

Joe Posnanski: The Last Second

Wistful Thinking

Wistful Thinking –

Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?”  And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen.

Let’s all send Mark some traffic today…

Wistful Thinking

SuperDuper, Time Machine, and Bulletproof Backups

My advice for a good backup strategy? Keep it simple. Keep it safe. Don’t stress the details.

The “you should backup regularly” argument needs little coaxing. Everybody “knows” they should backup the problem is they don’t. A backup plan is only as good as its followthrough – which is why Time Machine is so epic. It backs up every hour for you. You don’t even know it’s running but you hear the hard drive spinning, and watch your system slow down for a few minutes.

Once people jump on the backup regularly bandwagon, the sinkhole that many fall into is to stress the details: the absurd fear that some day there will be some file that they will absolutely have to have. And when that day does come they will discover that they have deleted the file – or overwritten it, or something else catastrophic – and thus, by not having that one file at the theoretical moment of truth they will not impress their fellow nerds in a, “Look what I kept for all these years. What do you mean, “so what?”” moment of glory.

Of course, there are those who do need multiple backups, archive history and the ability to roll back, and you know who you are. But for the average user here is my advice: keep it simple; use SuperDuper to keep a bootable copy of your main startup drive, and let Time Machine do its thing to archive stuff. And hope you never need to use either.

Backing Up

With the advent of Time Machine backup awareness went through the roof. So far I have only used Time Machine once since Leopard came out…

It was while working on the NetNewsWire review. I made a folder with some screenshots and had it sitting on my desktop for a day or two. I moved the folder, and a few weeks later when I was ready for the screenshots I couldn’t remember where I had moved the folder to or what it was even called. What I did remember was that the folder had been on my desktop. So I launched into outer space and found the archived version and restored it.

To recap: the only time I have ever used Time Machine was to find a misplaced folder.

My point? Time Machine makes a better archive system than it does a catastrophic events solution. Not that Time Machine is not a good backup solution, but it’s not the best answer to every data-loss problem. Which is why SuperDuper is the ideal companion to everyone using Leopard and an absolute necessity to everyone on 10.4 and below.

On page 14 of his epic Leopard review, John Siracusa talks about Time Machine and shares some (pre-Leopard) backup stats of Mac users based on a poll Apple took:

Eighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should backup their data. (This is scary already. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do backup their data. That actually doesn’t sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only four percent backup regularly.

In a nutshell, this means that if you could snap your fingers and make one Mac user’s main hard drive disappear, there’s a 96 percent chance that you just destroyed files that are completely unrecoverable.

Now, for those of you that know you should backup regularly, but don’t, I’m guessing there are two main reasons:

  1. Negligence – You just haven’t gotten around to buying a backup hard drive, or if you have you don’t feel like plugging it in to your laptop every. single. night… Ugh.
  2. Ignorance – I don’t know the real numbers, but before Time Machine came along I’m sure the vast majority of the average Mac user had no idea where to start in regards to setting up a backup plan.I know most of you reading this are much more tech savvy than the average user, but think of how many people you know need help just to sync their iPod. It’s those people who saw backing up as an intimidating venture they didn’t have the energy to figure out, if they thought of it at all.

Time Machine is creating a new mindset for the average user that backing up is important and it can be done without as much effort as they think; arguably making Time Machine the most significant addition to an operating system ever. But not without drawbacks…

SuperDuper’s tag line brags that their software is for “mere mortals”. Meaning people like you and me and even our iPod challenged friends. SuperDuper is not difficult or intimidating. In fact it’s just about as easy to use as Time Machine. But what’s more is that SuperDuper offers some data recovery and emergency response solutions which Time Machine doesn’t.

An Aside About Hardware

To have backups you have to have hard drives. I own four. One in my laptop, two in my Mac Pro and one external firewire.

The HDD in my laptop doesn’t get backed up. It’s my secondary machine, and any important files I may create on it during the day get moved to the Mac Pro. If my laptop dies on me I’m not afraid of losing any vital data. If I do happen to lose some vital file that only exists on my laptop I don’t know what it is anyway, so I’ll let ignorance be bliss.

Of the two HDDs in my tower, one is a 250GB boot disc and the other a 500GB drive for Time Machine. I purposefully bought a smaller backup drive for Time Machine as a way to “hem myself in.” At 500GB it looks like i will get about 6 months worth of archived info, which is more than I need (or want). I don’t want years and years of old files waiting around never to be used like a room in the basement filled with boxes of potentially important keepsakes that most likely belong to my great-aunt twice removed anyway.

My fourth and final hard drive is the most important component of my backup hardware: a Lacie 250GB FireWire400/FireWire800/USB drive dubbed “The Wardrobe”. It sits on the floor behind my Mac Pro and holds the nightly build of my Mac Pro’s boot disc. This is the drive I use with SuperDuper. It will plug into any Mac to give me instant access to my files and operating system. You can buy your own from Amazon.

What I like about the external drive holding the clone of my boot disc is that I can take it with me wherever I want and have an exact copy of my main machine that I can plug into any other Mac. I hardly ever do this, but it’s important to me for two reasons:

Since my laptop is my secondary machine there can be times when it doesn’t have a file I need. Usually it’s not a problem, and I just get the file later in my day when I go home. But if I”m on a long trip I need a different plan. Since Back To My Mac is not exactly reliable yet – and even when it does work it’s less than speedy – having an exact clone of my main hard drive readily available eliminates the possible stress of “client emergencies”.

Secondly, having all my data cloned on the external drive means if I ever sell my Mac Pro, send it to the repair shop or lose it, I am not out of my data. And I’m not sure how you lose a 60 pound tower, but I’m just sayin’…

The Right Tool for the Right Job

For the most part, there are only a few situations when you will be glad you have a backup:

  • When you realize you’ve deleted something that was extremely important.
  • When your hard drive takes a nose dive and all your info is gone, and you don’t want to pay $2,000 for the guys in space suits to extract your data with tweezers and chewing gum.
  • When something else on your computer, unrelated to your hard drive brakes and you have to send your whole computer in for repair, and it conveniently comes back with a clean install of OS X.
  • The latest software update or some new application suddenly barfs all over your system and everything is now buggy and unusable. (We’ll get more into this particular situation with SuperDuper’s “Sandboxing” later on.)

Only one of the above four scenarios is best solved by Time Machine; leaving SuperDuper as the ideal solution to the other three.

Time Machine

Like I said earlier, Time Machine makes a better archive system than a backup solution. There are several great reviews of Time Machine already, and there is clearly no need to go into detail on the ins, outs, whats and hows of Time Machine. But for the sake of context here is a brief, laymen’s terms overview of what Time Machine does…

When you first plug in your 2nd hard drive Time Machine asks if you want to use this as your backup drive. You say yes and it copies all your files over to the backup. From that point on Time Machine works in the background.

Every hour it takes a quick look at your whole computer to see if any file, setting or program is new or has changed. If something is new or changed Time Machine backs up those files — thus making “snapshots” of what your computer looked like at any given point in time. (So that’s where they got the name!)

At the end of the day Time Machine will fold your hourly backups into a single backup “snapshot” of that day, and at the end of the month it folds the daily backups into single snapshots for the week.

Time Machine keeps old backups as long as there is room on your backup drive. When the drive gets full, Time Machine starts replacing the oldest snapshots with the newest ones.

So this all comes in to play if you lost, accidentally deleted or (in my case) misplaced a file. You simply open up time machine to get instant access to all the archives. Then use the big arrows to go backward and forward in time, or use the tick marks on the right to select a specific snapshot.

One look at the finder-based interface and it’s clear to anyone that Time Machine’s main purpose is to go back in time to recover lost or missing files.
Time Machine User Interface

The biggest problem with Time Machine will arise if and when your startup drive becomes unusable for whatever reason. If all you have is your startup disc and your Time Machine backup then you will need to get a new hard drive, and restore your backup onto it. Even if you can run out to the store and be back lickety-split you’ll still be spending several hours waiting on Time Machine to restore its backup to your new drive.

What then if you need to keep working? Well, if you have a recent backup via SuperDuper you can easily re-start your computer using the backup drive and carry on as you were in a matter of minutes. Minutes! And even suppose you were working on files this morning that you need but you backed up with SuperDuper last night? Once you’re re-booted from your backup, you can then access Time Machine and restore the archived files that Time Machine automatically backed up earlier.

On the Shirt Pocket Watch weblog Dave Nanian explains more on how SuperDuper compliments Time Machine:

Our tagline, Heroic System Recovery for Mere Mortals, tries to sum up the whole idea: SuperDuper! is designed to provide excellent failover support for the all-too-common case where things fail in a pretty catastrophic way, such as when a drive fails, or your system becomes unbootable. We do this by quickly and efficiently creating a fully bootable copy of your source drive. Perhaps more importantly, recovery is near immediate, even if the original drive is completely unusable, because you can start up from your backup and continue working.

You can even take your backup to a totally different Macintosh, start up from it, and work while your failed Macintosh is in the shop… then, when it comes back all fresh and shiny, restore things and keep working. And even if the other Mac is a different CPU type, you can still open and edit the files on the backup.

You cannot do this with Time Machine: Time Machine copies are not bootable until they’re restored.

In SuperDuper!, system recovery is done with a minimum of fuss and bother, and with respect for your time. Yes, Time Machine can restore a full system, but that’s not its strength. Doing so requires you to actually start up from the Leopard DVD (which you’ll need to have with you) and then take the time to restore the backup in full, which interrupts your workflow, requires a working, entirely separate destination device, and takes a lot of your time — at the exact moment when you can least afford it.

The Clearly Time Machine has in no way made SuperDuper insignificant or inconsequential. In fact, if I had to choose between the two I’d stick with SuperDuper. Here’s why…

SuperDuper!

Over the past fews months as I have been writing these reviews it wasn’t until I was writing about MarsEdit that I realized each application has something in common: feel and depth.

NetNewsWire, Mint, Transmit, Coda, MarsEdit and now SuperDuper; each one is an applications which feels light and easy to use but has a depth of features and ability. Each of these apps are useful; from the most basic users to the most advanced tech savvy Apple gurus.

I have only ever used SuperDuper for one thing: absolute headache free backups of my system.

Those 7 words are the entire reason I’m writing this article. Each night when I’m done at my computer I quit out of everything and launch SuperDuper. (If I wanted to set a schedule I could, but I prefer to just do it manually – I’m a control freak.)

SuperDuper! Home Screen
I double check the Copy from and the to. It looks good, o.k. then, Copy Now. Off to bed, and I know that all the work I did that day is safe.

If I wake up tomorrow to find my start-up disc went kaput I can just boot up from the external drive as if there was no problem and get right to work. Then when I have time I can replace my drive and restore from SuperDuper or Time Machine at my own leisure.

The good news with SuperDuper now being Leopard compatible,1 is that it integrates with Time Machine…

Time Machine and SuperDuper!

There are two ways SuperDuper works with Time Machine: One is the ability to copy your Time Machine backup over to another drive without losing the archived history.

Second is the ability to store a bootable backup via SuperDuper along side the same files on the same drive as Time Machine. This means if you already have an external hard drive with your Time Machine backup, you can put bootable clone on there as well without interrupting anything. Or if you only want to own one backup hard drive you can use it simultaneously as a bootable clone and as the Time Machine archives.

Unfortunately there is currently no documentation on how SuperDuper operates in conjunction with Time Machine other than what’s mentioned in the release notes.

So to make things as clear as I understand them, to create a bootable backup along side Time Machine you have to select your startup volume in the Copy menu, your Time Machine drive in the to menu, “Backup – all files” in the using menu and, most importantly, be sure you choose “Smart Update [Time Machine drive] from [Startup Drive]” in the options tab under the During copy menu.
During copy menu options

And even when you do have the correct options set up in SuperDuper and are ready to make your bootable backup onto your Time Machine drive the “What’s going to happen?” text is so poorly written it’s not clear what exactly you’re doing. It even sounds as if you may ruin something:

Pressing “Copy Now” will first repair permissions on Macintosh HD. The Time Machine backups on Time Machine will be preserved. […]

Smart Update will copy and erase what’s needed to make Time Machine identical to your selections from Macintosh HD. The result will mimic “Erase Time Machine, then copy files from Macintosh HD”, but will typically take a fraction of the time.

If not for the second sentence in the first paragraph stating the preservation of the Time Machine backups, it sounds like SuperDuper plans on deleting your whole Time Machine drive to make room for the new backup.

Comparing the “Smart Update…” description to the “Erase then Copy…” description does make the former a little more clear:

Pressing “Copy Now” will first repair permissions on Macintosh HD, and then erase Time Machine. The Time Machine backups on Time Machine will be erased as well. To preserve your Time Machine backups, choose Smart Update.

Despite the copy text not being super duper clear, I have no doubt the process can be trusted.

Sandbox

The “Sandbox” is where SuperDuper shows of some serious backup kung-fu. For those who may not be familiar with what the Sandbox is, it’s easiest to explain with a (simplified) drawing:
SuperDuper! Sandbox Diagram
A Sandbox is basically an isolated copy of your system files. SuperDuper will create this for you on a local partition of your startup volume or on an external drive. (If you’re using a laptop SuperDuper recommends partitioning your internal HDD to hold the Sandbox because it has to be always accessible as the start up volume.)

SuperDuper creates the Sandbox by copying over all important system files, then setting the Sandbox as the “startup volume”. Now your computer will boot up and use the Sandbox system files instead of your primary system files. The advantage to this is that you can use your computer just like normal with no worries about installing system updates or new applications. The files will install in the Sandbox and not in the primary system folder.

If a system update or application has a major bug it’s no skin off your back. You can just reboot out of the Sandbox and your back to your clean system files then repair the Sandbox. No harm done, rest easy.

The Sandbox feature is a bit too rich for my blood, and I don’t use. But it is a great testimony to the extent and depth of features that SuperDuper offers for what could be considered a simple “copy and paste” backup utility.

Documentation

Shirt Pocket’s documentation notes on SuperDuper are quite clear and exhaustive, with much more info on the additional features. I recommend you look there for more details, although as of now it hasn’t been updated with any Leopard specific information.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.

  1. Am I the only one surprised to not see a 512×512 pixel icon accompany the 2.5 Leopard compatible update? Shirt Pocket is still using SuperDuper!’s original 128×128 icon. Additionally there is no mention of Leopard compatibility features (i.e. Time Machine stuff) in their help files or reference manual. ↵
SuperDuper, Time Machine, and Bulletproof Backups

A Response to An Open Letter to the Blogosphere

Michael Mistretta: –

We have the privilege of living in one of the greatest times in human history. No longer does it take millions of dollars to make our voices heard around the world. With the advent of the Internet, people are now connected in ways they never could have been before.

I couldn’t agree more.

The reality that you or I can pound away on our keyboards, click a mouse button and instantly someone in Russia, London, Brazil or anywhere else can read what we have to say is amazing.

Michael makes another great point about the power of the personal weblog: that there is a direct line of communication between the writer and the reader. The thoughts and words of great men and women can shift cultures.

This is exactly the same vein I have talked about on more than one occasion. It’s a plea to conciously push your writing, and to go beyond repetition and rhetoric. To open up a bit, and to truly invite people into something great – something beyond information.

The problem isn’t in the volume of new blogs being started every day. Blogging is a massive opportunity and people have all sorts of motives to jump in: personal, business, pleaser, whatever. The problem is the fear of man. That fear to be ourselves, to speak truthfully and honestly, to stand up for what we know to be right and true and beautiful and wonderful.

I may sound a bit “intense” but I know what I’m saying rings true for many of you. Not everyone cares about their weblog as a means to improve the lives of others, but some of us do. And we can start by using our words to speak (er, type…) life and truth.

A Response to An Open Letter to the Blogosphere

The Death of Voice Mail

Randy Bohlender, and The Death of Voice Mail. –

At the end of the day, visual voice mail helps you do what you want to do with voice mail – ignore them, but with greater flexibility. I’m beyond prioritizing them. I’m ready to ignore them all. […]

So today I killed my voice mail. Actually, I didn’t even give it the dignity of doing the deed myself. I took out a contract on it. I had my assistant kill it for me. She called the cell phone company this afternoon and said “The voice mail….can you just turn it off? Yes. Off. He doesn’t want it.”

The Death of Voice Mail

Interview with Cameron “i/o” Hunt

There’s a shortage of well-designed tumblelogs on the internets these days. And like a one-man brute squad, designer Cameron Hunt has been putting up an inconceivable fight to help dispairing websites.

Cameron has released several Tumblr themes, and his website, cameron.io, is recognized all over as a well designed website and a pillar example of tumble blogging.

I had the chance to interview Cameron via email and talk with him about tublelogging, web-design and a few other tidbits.

The Interview

  • SHAWN BLANC: Let’s start with the weblog: why did you start publishing?
  • CAMERON HUNT: I’ve had a website since I was in high school. I love websites, I love having a website. It’s my passion. For a long time I considered a different career because I love making websites so much, I really didn’t want to make them for anyone other than me. I guess that sounds a little selfish.Both my parents were involved in journalism, and in high school I was heavily involved in my school’s newspaper. I love publishing, and I love writing about what I love. Blogging is all about doing what you love, forget the rest. You blog because you love it, not because you want it as your career, or because Google Adsense might make you rich.

    It’s like being a rock star, but less cool, and no one knows you.

  • SHAWN: Interesting response to your own passion for designing sites: You love it so much you didn’t want to do it. Though oddly, I know just what you mean.And I couldn’t agree more with your thoughts on blogging. I think it’s the passion that makes or breaks a weblog. Of course I’m sure that not everyone who publishes a weblog does so because they love it, there’s always going to be the guy who thinks he can get rich overnight with Adsense.

    So, besides your Tumblr themes, what other web designing do you do?

  • CAMERON: I do freelancing here and there. I’ve done some print design, mostly posters and brochures. I used to work at my college’s Marketing and Communications department; I worked on web and print projects, and I was one of the few people who understood both at my job.I was also one of the only people at Marketing and Communications that understood HTML/CSS and design. I always underestimate my talent and skill for understanding and implementing a design into HTML and CSS, it’s because I know so many web designers online who are good at it. But in the real world, it’s an uncommon skill. A lot of people can design, less can web design, and even less can design a website with beautiful markup.

    Besides tumblelogs, I haven’t designed much that’s online. I designed Nick Douglas’s tumblelog which was the job that started my freelance tumblelog services. Most of my web design until 2007 were my own personal projects.

  • SHAWN: I haven’t studied your code or anything so I can’t say about your developer skills, but you clearly have a great eye for classy design.And you are certainly making a name for yourself lately. I see your name popping up all over the place, and primarily it seems like it’s related to your use of Tumblr and the look of cameron i/o.

    Why did you pick Tumblr as your CMS?

  • CAMERON: There’s a lot of reasons, but I’d have to say the biggest is ease of use. I got interested in tumblelogging in 2006. I ran a website called “shrimpdesign,” it was my portfolio and blog rolled into one. I got interested tumblelogging in late 2006, so I added a tumblelog to my blog. They were just little snippets in my regular blog posts.Eventually I wanted to separate my blog and portfolio, so I set out to make the same kind of website that I have now: a regular blog mixed with a tumblelog. Except I made it with Textpattern, which didn’t work so well. It was hard to update. And I hacked Textpattern to get it to work the way I wanted to, so it was a hatchet job.1

    I found Tumblr a couple months after abandoning Shrimpdesign. I was resolute in dropping my silly online identity of “shrimpdesign” in favor of a respectable and mature identity. I played around with Tumblr for a while, and in less than a month, I bought a domain name for my Tumblr powered tumblelog. Tumblr was incredibly simple to use, it was a breeze to theme, a joy to post.

    Tumblr’s bookmarklet was really the turning point for me. Above all other easy-to-use Tumblr features, the bookmarklet is their pride and joy. The bookmarklet is the easiest way to post something you found. If Steve Jobs demo’d it, he’d say “boom” at least 4 times, and “like butter” at least twice. It’s really good.

  • SHAWN: How has cameron.io changed from its original launch to what it is now?
  • CAMERON: I’m not sure how to answer that question. In my mind, cameron i/o doesn’t change. I change. This website is a representation of myself on the internet, my endeavors and passions. I change over time, and my website reflects that, but my website will never change in it’s extension of me.
  • SHAWN: I can’t think of a better motivation to publish a tubmelog: The concept of a website being an extension of yourself. That would make a fantastic ad campaign for tumblelogs. And not that this is related, but I’m reminded of how parents are now registering their newborn kid’s namesake URL on the day of their birth.Regarding Tumblr, I have to admit that I’ve done virtually zero research. What exactly is Tumblr?
  • CAMERON: It’s a tumblelogging engine. “Tumblelog” is a term coined in 2005 by this guy named “Why.” He’s sort of the crazy uncle of the Ruby community. Anyways, he used the term to describe Anarchaia and the term stuck.Wikipedia will tell you that Anarchaia is the first official tumblelog. That’s bull. Tumblelogs have been around, but there’s never been a term. I believe that Daring Fireball and Kottke.org, some of the most popular blogs on the internet, are tumblelogs. I’d even call ShawnBlanc.net a tumblelog.

    The real definition of tumblelogging is this: different presentation and format for different types of posts.

    Back to Tumblr.

    Tumblr is currently the easiest way to start a tumblelog. Although it doesn’t get credit for being the first tumblelogging engine. Ozimodo was probably the first tumblelogging engine, it was written in Ruby. Tumblr is a lot like Kleenex, they are the standard because they set the standard. Every tumblelog engine since Tumblr has pretty much copied them (not in a bad way, mind you, but in a competition-helps-users way).

  • SHAWN: Would you recommend Tumblr to someone that ran a primarily ‘article focused’ blog, but still wanted to post a linked list?
  • CAMERON: You can use Tumblr for anything you want. You can post text and links exclusively. There’s no way to have a “more” link where some of a post’s content is reserved for the permanent link. I’d recommend Tumblr and Chryp to anyone who wants to start a tumblelog and blog hybrid. Tumblr is the best hosted solution (if you want simplicity and no hassle), Chyrp is a hosted solution with more customization and control.
  • SHAWN: What are you doing on your site then when you write an article and post a link to it on your homepage with the “read more…” link? Is that hand coded by you each time, or are you doing something special on cameron i/o?
  • CAMERON: Yes, I hand-code it every time I post an article.I’ve got a lot of reasons to switch to Chyrp, and that’s one of them. Nothing against Tumblr, but I need complete control over my website. With Chryp, I’ll be able to customize and automate my site like never before.
  • SHAWN: You’re pretty involved in the Tumblr community. How has it grown and evolved since you first started using it?
  • CAMERON: I missed the first version of Tumblr. I started using it somewhere between 1.0 and 2.0, it’s hard to tell because Davidville had no official release date for 2.0, my guess is it happened over the summer sometime. There were only small updates before the release of 3.0 on November 1st. Tumblr 3.0 is a great service for anyone starting a tumblelog.Everyone associates me with the Tumblr community. I love tumblelogging, and Tumblr is the biggest tumblelogging community, but I’m not married to Tumblr. I’m planning on moving from Tumblr this year. I love Tumblr, but I’m a complete control freak when it comes to cameron i/o.

    I’m going to move to Chyrp once it stabilizes and a few key modules are released. I have minimal knowledge of PHP so I can control cameron i/o more fully than Tumblr. Of course I’ll still use Tumblr for some things, and I’ll probably keep releasing themes.

  • SHAWN: Like you said earlier, the main idea behind a tumblelog is that different posts have different styles: One style for quotes, another for links, another for articles, etc…Unfortunately, the majority of Tumblr websites I come across look very ugly to me – they are cluttered, choppy and messy.

    When you design a tumblelog theme, what are some key style guidelines (if any) that you try to implement?

  • CAMERON: I am very adamant about distinction between posts. Tumblelogs are jumbled; their content is pulled form a variety of sources, the content itself is varied since you can post several different types of media. The key in tumblelog design is to bring order to the jumble. Since the content is jumbled more than most websites, the design has to compensate.This can be done in a few ways, my favorite would be icons and subtle styles for each post-type. And a good structure that all posts conform to, and normal text sizes. A lot of tumblelogs have different font sizes for different posts, for instance; photo captions would be slight larger than regular text posts. It drives me crazy because it’s all body text. Headers and quotes should be larger, but the body copy should be standard. I’m also very adamant about typography.
  • SHAWN: I agree with your views about typography but I don’t share your zeal for distinction between posts.Feel free to talk me out of this point of view, but I honestly don’t see a major need for distinction between posts in a tumblelog. Although I suppose that completely contradicts the definition of what a tumblelog is.

    I think slight “tip-offs” can add to a tumblelog’s design, but I don’t see it as a necessary component. I would rather see no variation in types of posts than the often gaudy typographic nightmares I usually see; i.e. what I’m pretty sure is the default Tumblr theme.)

    What I do like are sites such as yours, Sam Brown’s and Phil Bowell’s where colors and icons are used as a tip off for a different post type while the headers and body text are the same. But other than being pretty, is that really necessary?

    When I am reading a tumblelog I’m not scrolling down looking for “quotes” or “links”. I am just reading it. If something catches my attention it’s not the type or classification of a post, it’s the content which in that post.

  • CAMERON: I guess I phrased that wrong and mislead you a bit. I was talking about distinction between posts, not post-types. For instance, I’ve seen some tumblelogs that simply jam everything together, and it’s very hard to tell where one post ends and another begins. I think that’s awful because there’s no structure.No offense to David Karp, but some of the default themes are fairly schizophrentic in their typography.
  • SHAWN: “Fairly” may be an understatement, but yes, we’re agreed then.Designs aside for a second, one thing I very much like about Tumblr – and tumblelogs in general – is the easy on-ramp it has created for many people to start blogging.

    People who used to think, “There is no way I could write an article every day, thus I’ll never start a weblog,” are now realizing that they don’t have to write 500 words or more every day in order to publish their own site. I’ve said before that I think everyone should blog, and so I like what Tumblelogging has done in that regards.

  • CAMERON: Exactly! Tumblr takes out almost all the overhead in blogging, and focuses on content.
  • SHAWN: True. Of course, on the flip-side of that coin is the issue in which tumblelogging has created a vast amount of insipid weblogs where people simply post links and YouTube videos and random pictures with zero of their own commentary. Thus creating posts and links with no personality.
  • CAMERON: There’s the rub. I don’t think there’s any way to stop it, though the Tumblr folk are placing good restrictions to limit misuse. It has always been like that with blogging, there’s no easy answer or cure. It’s comforting to know blogs with good content are always highly respected.
  • SHAWN: I’m curious: If you could only post a “link-blog” or an “article-blog” which would you choose, and why?
  • CAMERON: I would, without question, choose an article-blog over a link-blog.Articles give me a higher amount of quality than a blog simply filled with links and descriptions. When I post a link, it’s just a link. When I post an article — a long form post that I’ve crafted from nothingness — I’m downright proud. It’s a greater sense of accomplishment. Not to say posting a link-blog is trivial, I’m just more passionate about my articles.
  • SHAWN: When posting links, is there something specific you look for? Is there a “criteria” that has to be met for you to link to or quote something? What’s the deciding factor behind what makes it on your tumblelog and what doesn’t?
  • CAMERON: I don’t have any specific criteria, it just needs to be interesting or thoughtful and within the scope of cameron i/o’s topics. It has to be incredibly interesting for me to post outside of my loose topics.
  • SHAWN: I notice that your site is almost completely text-only. Do you purposefully not post the common tumblelog elements such as YouTube videos and pictures?
  • CAMERON: There’s a good reason for that. I used to post any picture or video I came across and I found interesting. Recently I prefer to only post a video or picture if I’m the creator. If I didn’t make it, I link to it instead of reproducing it. It’s my policy now because that’s how I would like my content treated. Do unto others, and all that.
  • SHAWN: Talking more about web-design…As we touched on earlier, you have designed a handful of Tumblr themes. When desiging a theme what are some of the key components you integrate? Also, what impact on your own site have your themes had?
  • CAMERON: Well, it’s typically the other way around. I use concepts from my own tumblelog for my themes. For instance, when I began tumblelogging, very few people had a wide-layout for their tumblelog. My tumblelog had a wider layout and smaller text than most. That’s been reflected in my themes.A lot of my themes have the photo description on the side of photos instead of beneath. Other than that, nothing really comes to mind. I’ll be releasing a couple themes soon that use recycled designs from cameron i/o.
  • SHAWN: Actually, I was talking about traffic. What sort of impact has releasing Tumblr themes had on getting more readers and “followers” to your site?
  • CAMERON: A lot! There’s basically three reasons the majority of Tumblr users follow people: 1) They’re famous, or popular already; 2) Their Tumblr looks cool; or 3) You know them. I fall under number 2.Being a themer actually really made my Technorati rating completely out of proportion because it counted every Tumblr blog using my theme as a link to me, so I’m in the top 10,000 blogs on Technorati, but it doesn’t really matter since Technorati is going downhill.
  • SHAWN: I think that makes for an extremely valid argument as to why it’s important to have a well designed site. Of course, I suppose it’s not that people want to have a poorly designed site, they just don’t realize they have one. And I’d say it’s fair to assume the ratio of ugly Tumblr themes is much higher than other blogs ratio of ugly sites.
  • CAMERON: At least the majority of Tumblr blogs that are popular are also well designed and maintained. See, that’s another thing. You can have a beautiful theme, but if you format the text in an incoherent way, it looks terrible. A lot of the ugly comes from text formatting.
  • SHAWN: Well put.Now regarding Chyrp. With the recent hiccup on the Tumblr servers will you be migrating sooner now? Other than being able to install Chyrp on your own domain, are there any other incentives for switching?
  • CAMERON: There’s a lot of incentives. Right now cameron i/o is fractured. I got a Tumblr blog, two Textpattern installs for Articles and Projects, and a plain html file for my Colophon. It’s a bit painful to update. With Chyrp, I can manage my complete website from one Chyrp install. And I can have a search, which is something I really wanted for my tumblelog. And I can make my own post-types with a bit of PHP code.Also, I can finally exit sub-domain hell, and use my website like a normal person. My articles will be at cameron.io/articles, and my Mint will at last be in it’s rightful place at /mint/.

    Really, it’s all about the control. I can tweak everything with Chyrp, it offers me more control. I’m very picky and particular about my site.

  • SHAWN: Why not just use Textpattern for everything, or use Tumblr and put the full post in your main page’s stream?
  • CAMERON: First off, currently everything from Articles and Projects gets posted on my Tumblr. I like to keep the front page succinct, and if someone wants to explore an article (or project) further they can click a “more” link. Tumblr doesn’t really have support for the “more” link which is why I use Textpattern to supplement, and then I have to manually post each project and article.As for using Textpattern to power my whole site, there’s problems with that. Like I said, I’ve tried it before and Textpattern just isn’t made for the kind of site I want. First, no bookmarklet for easy posting. I really like Tumblr’s (and by extension Chyrp’s) bookmarklet.

    Second is post-types. You can fake post-types with Textpattern’s sections, but it’s not a perfect replacement for Tumblr or Chyrp. Third, Textpattern’s admin interface needs an overhaul. You can only edit your theme files in the Admin interface in a textarea.

    Also, Chyrp has a Tumblr importer. Which means the switch to Chyrp will be seamless, I bet most of my readers won’t even notice.

  • SHAWN: I’ve seen you mentioning you want to quit college and start freelancing. What would the ideal situation from here to there look like?
  • CAMERON: I’ll finish my current spring semester right now, and then quit. Basically, I’ll do the same thing I’ve always done, just with more of my money staying in my pocket, less debt and more time. There’s a lot of hoops you gotta jump through, and I’m just completely sick of it.Every time I work on a design project for school, I think “I could be designing for a real client right now.” So that’s what I’m going to do.
  • SHAWN: What do you want to do in the world of freelance web-design?
  • CAMERON: I want to design quality websites. I want to work on projects I’m excited about, and so far I am. I can’t wait to show off the stuff I’ve been working on.
  • SHAWN: What would an ideal job look like for you? Front-end design? Back-end development? Both? Weblogs, corporate sites, etc…?
  • CAMERON: Most of my design is front-end right now, but I’m trying to learn a few programming languages so I can at the very least understand what is going on behind the scenes. I always dreamed of working at Apple, like many nerd-designers do, but I have a feeling that’s not for me. I don’t think I could work for a large company.The ideal job for me is self-employment; designing, writing and creating what I’m passionate about.
  • SHAWN: Do you have any plans to start advertising on cameron i/o?
  • CAMERON: If I do, it’ll be small and discrete and not just an ad service. It’ll be catered to my readers and audience.
  • SHAWN: How much ‘work’ have you generated from your Tumblr themes? Meaning: Do you spend much time on pro-bono troubleshooting?
  • CAMERON: I don’t spend much time on that. I actually get more support requests for Tumblr. For instance, there was a tumblelog currently stealing content from a PS3 themes website, basically copying theme entries and hotlinking. So the owner of the website visited the tumblelog and assumed it was me since my name was in the footer. It happens more than you think.
  • SHAWN: Interesting. Cleaning up someone else’s mess is something I never even considered. I’ve thought about releasing a WordPress theme but don’t have the time to support it and don’t have the heart to tell people “sorry, can’t help you.”
  • CAMERON: I haven’t done much support. Most people who want to change the theme around do it on their own. I get a few requests, but not probably as much as you think. Although I need to update my themes for new Tumblr features.

More Interviews

Cameron’s is just one of a handful of interviews with some cool folks.

  1. A link to the “Hatchet Job” website. ↵
Interview with Cameron “i/o” Hunt

MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution

Applications are solutions.

At the very core, the entire point of developing an application is to solve a problem; inasmuch as a program fills a need, it succeeds.

Furthermore, if an application can not only solve a problem, but help the user enjoy the process, it succeeds even more. And often, the most popular applications of all are those which solve problems that didn’t necessarily need to be solved in the first place. These apps provide a solution that is so enjoyable and makes so much sense to the user the app becomes a necessity. And this is where the desktop publisher, MarsEdit, takes off…

Originally, desktop publishers were developed to fix a problem: The ugly, clunky and sluggish integrated editors that were part of blogging applications such as Blogger and Movable Type.

With the advancement that content management apps and their integrated editors have had over the years – along with the advent of high-speed internet (remember when 14.4k was blazing?) – many people don’t see the need for a desktop publisher. The “problem” sorta fixed itself by default.

Desktop Publishers

The most widely assumed purpose of a desktop publisher is so you can “write your blog posts offline.” Well we all know that you don’t need a desktop publisher to write a blog post while you’re on an airplane. (Ironically, I am doing just that right now. Seriously. I’m in seat 12F; next to my wife and a middle aged woman reading some Oprah endorsed romance novel.)

Let me briefly mention here that MarsEdit tackles the “writing offline issue” like nobody has ever tackled it before with a feature called “Perfect Preview”. But I’ll get to that in a bit…

Other advantages of desktop publishers include features like storing login and relevant meta info for multiple weblogs, (and multiple CMS platforms) which gives you the ability to publish to several sites from one spot.

To genuinely grasp the solution a desktop publisher offers, you have to think outside your paradigm of what you think a desktop publisher is. For starters it is much more than word processors with a “send to weblog” button.

You may not have thought about the fact that when you write a post from your CMS’s “Write a Post” browser interface you are typing into a text field. All the tags are black and blend right in with all the text (also black). There are no shortcut keys for custom tags, and you’re subject to the speed of your internet connection and availability of your server. (Have you ever tried posting an update or edit to an article while on Digg’s homepage?)

Not to say that CMS browser interfaces are the world’s biggest nightmare; I have gone back and forth several times…

My first blog started a few years ago with Blogger. That was a clunky publisher to say the least. I later moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog and went in and out between the WordPress interface and another popular desktop publisher, ecto.

Even though ecto was full of features, my user experience never seemed to “settle”, so I went back to using the online WordPress interface. But that wasn’t a long-term solution either, because as I began writing longer posts (specifically interviews which contain quite a bit of markup), WordPress’ lack of editing features and tag coloring became a deal breaker.

I finally landed with MarsEdit as my preferred method for publishing. I think I made a pretty good choice too, because the more I use it the more I feel it’s a Mac app which truly is out of this world. (Get it?)

Daniel Jalkut –

I don’t think anybody doubts that the web (and by extension, the world) is in the midst of a personal-publishing revolution, and most Mac users want to take part in it. I see MarsEdit today as the best-of-class application for achieving that…

MarsEdit

The fact that MarsEdit is still around – let alone in continued development as a fantastic application – is nearly a miracle. It has certainly seen quite a bit of action over the years.

Brent Simmons is the author of MarsEdit. It was originally a feature of the 1.x version NetNewsWire; you could read all your favorite weblogs and publish your own, all from the same application. But the feature (Notepad) eventually split off into its own app.

The name and icon for MarsEdit are actually spawns from another app that never even made it past the drawing board: MarsLiner.

MarsLiner was meant to be the outliner of Brent’s dreams. But alas, the market was too small to justify the time and energy it would take to develop. So instead, Brent took the MarsLiner logo kept the “Mars”, dropped the “Liner”, added the “Edit” and turned it into the stand-alone weblog editing application, MarsEdit.

After its original conception with NNW in 2002, MarsEdit 1.0 was released at the end of 2004. Brent Simmons expounds:

The genesis of MarsEdit was the idea of mitosis, that we could remove NetNewsWire’s weblog editor and create a new, separate weblog editor—and thereby create a better newsreader and a better weblog editor. […]

When we decided to bag MarsLiner and do a separate weblog editor instead, I wanted to use the name Mars somehow and use Bryan’s cool icon. Hence the name MarsEdit. We rationalized the name by saying it represents editing at a distance, since you’re not editing local documents, you’re editing documents that live on the web somewhere.

But really it was because I like Mars and spaceships and we already had a great Mars icon.

And icon designer, Bryan Bell, was kind enough to show off the stages of the design process:

MarsEdit Icon Evolution

Later, NewsGator bought MarsEdit as part of its acquisition of Ranchero Software in 2005, and Gus Mueller got contracted out to work on the 1.1.2 release.

Finally, Daniel Jalkut – who launched Red Sweater Software in 2000 while he was working for Apple as a software engineer until going indie in 2002 – bought MarsEdit on February 22nd, 2007.1

With a talented, and motivated developer, MarsEdit finally graduated to version 2.0 in September 2007. The 2.0 release brought a wave of much needed attention to the app, and highlighted it to a much broader audience; breathing fresh life back into it.

This weekend, Daniel has released the next major update, 2.1, with some great new features and fixes.

Your Very Own Editor

Perhaps one of the finest features of the desktop publisher is that it is also a text editor.

When publishing from your CMS’s online text field you’re using just that: a text field, not a text editor. Thus there’s no tag highlighting, no find & replace, etc… You can get around the text field problem by using a stand-alone text editor to write your posts, copy/paste to the online text field and then publish. But what makes having a desktop publisher for your weblog the better solution is that all the ‘stuff’ involved with writing and publishing is in one dedicated location.

In MarsEdit the default editor window is not quite the ideal layout. Well, at least not for me. It is small and doesn’t display the options I want. Opening the application dozens of time each week and having to adjust the editor window every time sure made for an annoying workflow thus making my primary turn-off towards MarsEdit the seeming innability to customize the default editor window’s size, layout or features.

Fortunately, after a bit of looking around I found out Daniel actually made it quite a breeze to adjust the default editor’s layout, size and features. I’m just blind sometimes:

Save Default Window Size

So here is how I have customized my editor window:

  • I prefer to have the options open at all times. This can be set from the Prefs in the “Editing” tab. Select “Open The Options Pane”.
  • With the options pane set, adjust your editing window to the width and length you want, then in the “Window” menu click “Save Default Window Size”.
  • I also prefer to name my own slugs for post permalinks. This can easily be done in the “Slug” field, which sits right under the “Title” field. To enable it, click on the “View” menu and check “Slug Field”.
    MarsEdit Title and Slug Fields

WYSIWYG

Something to note about MarsEdit is the blatant absence of a WYSIWYG editor, which many people might see as a fault.

In all my experience with WYSIWYG editors I have found them a clumsy enemy of fine web typography. Typing a weblog post in a WYSIWYG editor is a bit like laying out a book in Microsoft Word.

MarsEdit’s long-time competition, ecto, offers both a HTML editor and a WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, when writing in ecto, you cannot switch between the two editor windows without shooting you markup in the foot. If you begin in ecto’s HTML editor and switch to the WYSIWYG, ecto turns all your hand-coded CSS-friendly tags into HTML spans, which is, to say the least, highly annoying and extremely counter-productive.

If you have spent any time at all tweaking your site’s style sheet, and if you have any pride in your weblog’s type then using a WYSIWYG editor is most likely a crutch, not a tool.

I suspect most of you are at least a bit HTML savvy and prefer the use of monospace type and a HTML editor anyway. But for those who are getting weak in the knees at the thought of having to type your own HTML relax. MarsEdit has combined many of the WYSIWYG concepts and implemented them into the HTML editor making it all very easy to use.

For example, CMD+B will place <strong>strong</strong>
 tags around your text; CMD+I places <em>em</em> tags, etc.

Not only can you customize any of your own shortcut keys for markup – such as setting CMD+SHIFT+A as a link tag – MarsEdit 2.1 now offers markup right in the contextual menu.

Just control-click on a highlighted passage of text or a single word and choose your desired markup…
MarsEdit's Contextual Markup Window

The Feel Factor

The absence of the WYSIWYG editor fits perfectly into context with the overall feel of MarsEdit.

Making an application which at first glance feels thin is always a risk to developers. Folks may try out your program for a day or two, and when they don’t instantly see the exact features they want they assume your app is only half-full, so they leave it untouched and un-registered in their Applications folder to collect little bits of binary dust particles.

But if a developer can successfully create an application that feels light, though in truth is quite capable and feature-rich, they will succeed in the long run.

The more I use MarsEdit, the more I discover it functions exactly how it was intended to. It does not take much time to familiarize yourself with the application and customize it to work precisely how you want it to: with all the features sitting just below the surface, out of the way and ready to be utilized.

This is precisely the way a good weblog editing application should work.

An app like this must have the ability to offer all you want and need to publish your weblog according to the way you have it set-up. It must work seamlessly with over a dozen popular content management systems, and offer an interface for each one in a clean, simple fashion so as not to get in your way, slow you down or distract you while you’re writing. And this is where MarsEdit excels.

This feel of MarsEdit has been there from the very beginning. Even in the initial development and design phases, Brent had it as a part of his vision for the app: “The phrase ‘maximum elegance’ was just a personal reminder to myself to simplify as much as possible. With something as complicated as weblog editing, you have to be relentless about simplification, or it will get away from you.”

I am extremely impressed by how intuitive MarsEdit is and how well it serves the writer.

Perfect Preview

Hands down one of the finest features of MarsEdit is the Preview.

MarsEdit takes your post content and puts it into a preview template so you can read sans-markup. Cool, but not cutting edge.

What does make it so amazing is the ability to edit your preview template which allows you to read your article just as it would appear on your site after being published. You can set the Preview window right next to the editor window to watch changes and updates as you type them.

Daniel wrote a very succinct how-to on the Red Sweater Blog. Additionally you can find directions in MarsEdit’s help menu.

However, to step your “Perfect Preview” up an extra notch you may want to try tweaking the preview template to use localized files instead of your server-based, hosted files.

By doing this, not only will your preview window load and refresh faster, you will be able to write offline and still have the “live” preview of what your post will look on your own website.

If you are online – as you no doubt usually will be – you can preview remote files (such as uploaded images which are part of your post) and the localized files, which makes this desktop publisher all the more enticing.

Tweaking the preview template to become localized is extremely easy if you are even the least bit code savvy.

  1. Start by following MarsEdit’s instructions for editing the Preview Template. They can be found in the help menu.
  2. Once your initial Preview template is set up and working, download your weblog’s theme folder, or at least the style sheet.2
  3. Download each of the images in use on your ‘single post’ page. Place all these files into the same folder as your CSS file, and place the folder somewhere out of the way for safe, long-term keeping.
  4. If your Masthead image is a CSS background you’ll need to download that image and go in and adjust the the CSS code to point to the local file instead of the remote one.
  5. Now go into the local folder and control click the CSS file you just downloaded and open it in Safari.Copy all the text in the address field. This is the local address of your CSS file. It will look something like, file:///Users/……../style.css
  6. Return to the MarsEdit Preview Template, and find the line of code referencing your CSS file. Replace the current href address with the local address you just copied.
  7. Scroll through the rest of the template and find the code for each of the images you downloaded. In the src tags, replace whatever the online address was with the new local address.

Something to keep in mind now that your preview template has been localized is that changes you make to your website won’t be reflected in MarsEdit’s preview window. You’ll have to make the changes your local files separately if you want everything to match.

Media Manager

If you’ve used WordPress’ built-in uploader you know that anything can be better than that. My previous workflow would be to upload any images via Transmit and then code the img tags by hand.

MarsEdit has the ability to upload images to your weblog for you. You can drag an image right into the editor – dropping it in the location you want it to appear in your post. The Media Manager will then pop up, giving you a few options and a button to “Upload & Insert”. MarsEdit then generates all the code for you right where you wanted it.

There is one major drawback which I’ve found regarding the file uploader: There is no way to adjust the auto-generated code. I have custom image classes set in my style sheet that I want to use instead of MarsEdit’s default markup styles. Since I can’t make my own I have to ‘fix’ the code for images I upload through MarsEdit.3

Something you may not know is that the Media Manager auto detects what folder to upload files to. It would be nice to have the option hard code your own custom folder, but that requires MarsEdit to have FTP support which it currently doesn’t.

Right now it simply auto detects what folder to upload to by talking to your CMS. Fortunately, most CMSs allow you to customize the folder yourself. Since I prefer to send any images to my site’s /images/ folder as opposed to the standard /wp-content/uploads/ folder, I went to my WordPress admin panel, clicked on Options, Miscellaneous, and then changed the default uploads folder.

The Little Things…

Post Status

Something new in 2.1 is that you can now adjust the post status of your post.

This gives you the ability to send your post to your weblog as a Draft instead of a Published article. Assuming your CMS handles drafts, and assuming your CMS knows how to communicate draft status. WordPress and Movable Type suck at this right now, but Daniel created a little built-in hack for us:

…add a category “MarsDraft” to any of your posts, and when MarsEdit sees the category, it will automatically assume that the post is to be treated as a draft. So to make sure you don’t accidentally publish something early, just add the magic category, and remember to turn it off when you change the status to Published.

Anyway, the Post Status drop-down menu sits in the bottom of the options pane along with the Text Filter, Comments and TrackBacks options:
MarsEdit Post Status

I would love to see local draft syncing between multiple Macs. But since that feature is still MIA at the moment one of the cool advantage of the new “Post as Draft” feature is the ability to have (jimmy-rigged) synced drafts between versions of MarsEdit on multiple computers.

Unfortunately this is certainly not the ideal way to sync drafts. When you post the article it goes from your local drafts folder into the main weblog article list. As it sits there, it will eventually get pushed down the list until it disappears if you post too many real articles before publishing the draft. One way to work around this by setting the time-stamp to a date far in the future.

Another problem with remote drafts is that if you open one, edit it and save it (not re-send it), the edited version of your post becomes a local second copy. You have to send the local draft to your weblog to send the edits and get back down to one copy of your post. This is all very confusing and I see lots of potential for accidentally publishing the wrong version of a post or even deleting the right version.

If you use Daniel’s category workaround and my time-stamp workaround, if you want to take a draft and publish it you have to open it, re-adjust the time-stamp, uncheck the MarsDraft category, change the Post Status to “Published” and then send it to your weblog again as a bona fide post. Not exactly the best solution. Ah well.

To recap, I see three options for draft syncing: (a) Create your own workflow based on the workarounds; (b) don’t try to sync your drafts; or (c) wait for true local draft syncing via .Mac/FTP or something else. (Will us dual-computer folks ever get a break?)

The good news is, if you’re not worried about syncing to multiple Macs the draft feature as a draft feature works just fine.

Scriptable

MarsEdit is scriptable. Which means that in addition to having several, intelligent scripts built-in, you can also add your own.
MarsEdit Scripts

The Text Statistics script may be my favorite, simply because I’m a nerd for stats and info. Though the text counter always seems to be generous; according to MarsEdit, this article weighs in at 4,160 words.

Safari Bookmarklet

MarsEdit has a built in bookmarklet which can be used to generate a brand new post from any webpage. To set it up choose Install Bookmarklet from the MarsEdit menu.

Now if you find a sweet article in Safari, and you want to write about that article on your own weblog, just highlight the text you want to use in your post and then click your new fandangled bookmarklet. MarsEdit will open – if it’s not already – and generate a new post for you.

The webpage’s title will be your new post-title, and the text you had highlighted will show up in the body along with a link back to the article. But that’s just the start…

From the prefs window click the “Attribution” tab to go nuts customizing the markup and the layout you want to be used when you generate a new post with the Safari bookmarklet.

My customized syntax looks like this:

<a href="#url#">#title#</a> -

<blockquote>#body#</blockquote>

MarsEdit Attribution Code

What the above code does is put the name of the article as a link back to the web address I’m quoting, and then any selected text into block quotes from there. I usually tweak this a bit but it’s a great starting place for all of my asides and link-posts.

Command, Shift, D

Perhaps the feature that stands out to me the most is the shortcut key-command to publish your post: CMD+SHIFT+D.

It is the same shortcut used in Apple Mail to send an email. It’s a smart feature, and although it’s small it makes the app instantly more coherent and familiar to the Mac user.

Here is a free tip: When I customized my toolbar I took the “Send to Weblog” button right out. I found it is almost as easy to accidentally click the send button instead of save as it is to press command, shift, D when you’re actually ready to publish.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.

  1. There was a great Q&A done by NewsGator with Brent Simmons and Daniel Jalkut, but the origial page has gone missing from NewsGator’s site. Fortunately you can still find it on the Wayback Machine, and if that happens to go gone, I also saved a screenshot of the Q&A webpage here. ↵
  2. If you’re not sure where your site’s CSS file is, simply open up your homepage and view your source. Look for a line of code that reads something like this:<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="...style.css" />

    Copy the href location and paste it into your browser’s address bar, hit return and you should see your style sheet. Save it to your hard drive, and put into a new folder.↵

  3. Daniel has told me this is high on his list of feature additions.↵
MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution

MarsEdit 2.1

MarsEdit 2.1 –

In summary, MarsEdit 2.1 has a new search feature, a new capsule-based tags editor, support for Movable Type tags, support for saving drafts to the server, massively improved preview performance and usability, and a bunch of other performance boosts and feature tweaks.

The first major update to MarsEdit since 2.0 came out last fall. I had the privilege to help with the beta testing and I’ll tell you that there are some great additions and improvements.

And if you’re wondering, yes I have a review coming out shortly.

MarsEdit 2.1