More On MarsEdit And Text Styles

In my previous post on Ecto I said that it was not possible to have differing text styles in MarsEdit but I now have to refute that claim. It is of course possible, if not readily apparent how to achieve it. To do this you have to create the HTML mark up text yourself using the Markup editor. Once you have done so it is a simple matter of entering some text and then applying the style that you have created as in this example. Not as easy to achieve as in Ecto but it does work. The HTML used to turn the selected text to Comic Sans is as follows:

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS';"></span>

By creating the opening markup with an 'asktext' directive you can enter the name of the font family at the time that you apply the style as I have done here, below is what the opening markup looks like.

<span style="font-family: '#asktext Enter Text:#';">

This is fine as long as you know the name of the font you want to use! I don't really use too many different fonts so it will not be a problem for me to create separate styles for the ones I use.

Ecto

Not too dissimilar to MarsEdit in it's look and feel. It was initially a little more complicated to set up the accounts, certainly for Blogspot, but not too bad.

I have noticed that occasionally it seems to do funny things in formatting, but that might just be me. It also seems to have issues with categories, doesn't always retrieve them from the blogs or create new ones when asked to.

It is pretty good at formatting text, for instance this bit of text is in Comic Sans MS, whereas the rest is in Arial. In MarsEdit you can't seem to mark individual portions of text just the complete article.

Inserting pictures from Flickr is pretty simple, or so I thought, you just use the Flickr Helper addon, however today that doesn't appear to be working, in that it is not allowing me to get to any of my photos even though it is displaying their names (not the thumbs though). None of the editor toolbar formatting buttons appear to be working anymore either, maybe the demo license has expired, it certainly hasn't nagged me and formatting from the menu still appears to work!

The more I test these applications the more holes I appear to find! This post, without a photo was posted using Ecto.

OK, I can put a Flickr picture in by hand, so here is one of Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire.

More on Blog Software

Blogo

Just did a copy and paste in Blogo and of the previous Blogo post and found that although I did a cmd A to select all the text when I pasted the text back into a new post window the paragraph after the picture (and the picture) were not pasted. Doing a paste into an external application did paste everything in (except the picture and the bulleted list was pasted but not visible). If you copy the raw HTML you can paste it back as long as you are in the HTML window. If you try and paste it into the normal editing window it tries to import the image. Their copy and paste really does have some issues!

MarsEdit

In MarsEdit there is no HTML editor as such but you can add HTML markup tags from the tool bar dropdown or from the context sensitive menu directly into your post. These show up in blue. All formatting is done this way so you do need to be comfortable with seeing markup tags in the editor. There are not that many tags provided as standard but you can easily add your own by selecting Edit.... from the Markup menu. I found that I had to add a couple of extra tags in order to be able to do bulleted lists (which in Blogo are provided by just clicking a button). Theses are the 2 tags that I had to add:

• ul tag to create the list
• li tag to create each item

It works.

MarsEdit

This post will be very similar to the previous post, I'll use a different picture of course but otherwise it really just mirrors the previous one to see how easy MarsEdit is. The interface is not as simple as the Blogo one, having said that it is not as quirky either. It is much more of what I would call a standard Mac style interface. The main window is a bit like Mail or Thunderbird. The editor fairly standard though there is a second window which provides a dynamic preview of the post that is being created in the editor window. You can close the window if it starts to get really annoying! Well let's see how easy it is to drop a Flickr picture in then! That was about as easy as it gets, click Media, select the Flickr tab (the first time you do this it will open your browser to get Flickr authorisation, when you have done that just click Verify to continue), select your photo, job done. So here goes, let's post it!

Blogo

Well, I'm testing various blogging software for the Mac to see which one will be the one I end up using on a permanent basis.

At present I am trying 3 different ones:

• Ecto
• MarsEdit
• Blogo

I have been using Ecto for a few days and it isn't too bad though it does have a few quirks, but then I think all of them will have. I also tried iBlog but gave up more or less straight away when I couldn't find where to define the blog site! Might be that it does not support direct connection.

This is the first post using Blogo. The initial setup was very easy just clicked on the Blogspot icon, changed 'mysite' to 'photolouis', entered the user ID and password and that was it.

The editor is pretty simple and uncluttered, though fairly basic. There appears to be no HTML Tag highlighting when in HTML edit mode, which may not be an issue if you never want to edit raw data.

Now I need to be able to link to an image on Flickr, so how easy is that going to be I wonder?

Well that was really not that easy. When you go through the insert process using the bookmarklet all appears well until you post and then Blogo tries to upload the photo to Picasa, not quite what I had in mind! A bit of a Google and I found this post, unfortunately that didn't appear to work for me, all I could do was paste the Flickr HTML directly into the HTML editor, not a show stopper just a right royal pain! Have emailed support and will see what response we get back.

Other than that not too bad so far.