Archive for the ‘Services’ Category

Posted on October 1, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies

Review: MarsEdit Publishing From The Desktop

All of the post I write come through one program. MarsEdit. MarsEdit, in my opinion is the premier desktop blog publishing application on the planet. In this review I’m going to be looking at what makes it so good and also appealing to many people.

Background

MarsEdit is developed by Daniel Jalkut, though was previously part of NetNewsWire. However after changing ownership a couple of times it landed in the hands of Red Sweater Software and has gone through it’ 2.0 release and a lot of changes.

It’s used by some of the greats in the blogging world, one of them; Shawn Blanc had this to say in his review of MarsEdit:

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?)

Writing

Setting up your blog with MarsEdit is laughably simple. You enter the name and URL of your blog and it goes out and pulls down all the information it needs. Then you type in your username and password that you log into and you’re set up. I use Wordpress so I’ll be refering to that, however, Movable Type, Blogger, Drupal and many other blogging platforms are suppported.

The interface for MarsEdit is very simple, like most Mac applications. You have a small amount of buttons along the top varying from “New Post” to the search box, a new feature of the 2.0 release.

However most of the fun starts when you create a new post. There is, in fact no WYSIWYG editor built into MarsEdit. Some would say that this is a flaw, but I think it’s a feature. You don’t have to mess around with any formatting as you jump between views. It’s just simple text and there is nothing that the WordPress interface might not misinterpret as I found it often does when writing posts in their WYSIWYG view.

One problem that I have encountered is that there are just to many pop-up windows. I think that the Media uploader would be better suited as a drop down menu instead of an extra window.

Of course for the less code savvy (if you can call html code) along the top right hand corner there is a drop down menu with some of the more popular code snippets such as blockquotes, h1, h2 etc. Of course you can edit these and ad your own if you find yourself using any particular tag a lot of the time.

All from within the MarsEdit interface you can add tags and categories - change the post status. It is little things like this that sets this app apart.

Conclusions

MarsEdit is a fantastic bit of software let down by a couple of weaknesses in the UI. If you’re running Windows have no fear as Microsoft has Windows Live Writer for you and another WYSIWYG editor on the Mac is Ecto.

MarsEdit can be purchased for $29.95 from Red Sweater Software. There is also a free trial so you can become addicted.

Posted on September 19, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies

Feedburner: a blogger’s best friend

If you’re a blogger then you should be using Feedburner; a very powerful RSS publishing platform now owned by Google. The service is used by thousands of bloggers from around the world so that ten times that can read their content from the comfort of their own feed reader.

Feedburner has received much praise for its massive feature set but also criticism for its sometimes unreliable stats recording.

In this article I will be looking at some of the more interesting and popular features of Feedburner, but also the inevitable handicaps that a service is its scale naturally has.

Fantastic Features

 

• Easy set up - I wish most web services were so easy to configure. Once you have signed up for an account you simply put in your website URL on the front page and press next. You then, simply put in a couple of extra bits of information about your feed and the feed URL. That is how easy it should be to set up any web service you want to use.
• In for the long run - As I mentioned previously, Feedburner was acquired by Google not to long ago. Luckily for all its users, as if it were to go away so would all your subscribers. Now that they are owned by Google, we can we sure that the feeds will be accessible for a very, very long time.
• Adsense Integration - If you want to earn some money off the lazy lot who don’t bother to come to your site then Feedburner has a tool for you that easily ad a couple of adsense content and image ads. 
• Its Free! - Best of all you can get everything that Feedburner offers without spending a dime. Though this wasn’t originally the case, since the Google purchase all the pro features are available to you.

Possible Problems

  

• Dependence - If you start to get a lot of people subscribed to your feed and Feedburner does something horrible that you don’t agree with, (like put in their terms of use that they own all your content) you are still kind of tied into the service unless you don’t mind leaving your readers out in the cold.
• Unreliable stats - One problem I hear all the time from people using Feedburner is that their stats don’t always make sense, or sometime they drop to zero every so often. If you need really reliable stats for advertisers etc, this might be a problem, even if it doesn’t happen very often.
• Web UI not great - When I say “not great” I mean it isn’t as good as it could be. Sometime things don’t seem to be in the right place or are not entirely obvious. There is some room for improvement here, some novice users might find it a bit hard to get their heads round at first. That said, there are some great guides to Feedburner out there.

From the horse’s mouth

Blogging Adventure uses Feedburner and so does my personal blog. For the year that I have been using it, I have had relatively little issues with the service and plan on using it for the foreseeable future.

The features that you’ll find me using are the email subscriptions, Feed ads and the chicklets.

If you’ve never used or heard of Feedburner before I recommend that you check it out and see if it can enhance your website or blog.