OK, having decided to start a blog, my next step was to consider the options around blogging clients. I ruled out web clients straight away, as I was something that I can use off-line. A quick review of what people are saying online, led me to to the top two contenders, MarsEdit and Ecto

MarsEdit

My initial thoughts of MarsEdit were very positive. Its a powerful, well thought out application, with a very clean pleasant interface. The main editing window may not be to everyone's taste in that it is not WYSIWYG. Instead you have direct control over the html tags. For a control-freak like me, perfect!

It was all going so well, and then I decided to try uploading a photo to my blog. Photos you add to your blog are uploaded to Picasa, which is fine with me as my blog is hosted on Blogger (both Google Apps), however photos are uploaded immediately full size when you add them without any option to edit or resize them first! Unbelievable! My photos in iPhoto start from about 1MG in size and go up from there, so a post with a couple of photos quickly gets unmanageable. The only solution seems to be to do your resizing before uploading. What year is this? 1995? This limitation is a deal breaker for me unfortunately.

Ecto

Next I tried the other leading contender, Ecto. It does everything MarsEdit can, and probably more. My initial impression was that the UI wasn't as polished and more cluttered. The editor has a WYSIWYG more which some would prefer. On testing adding photos I was delighted to find that it does have the facility to resize photos. Hallelujah! The sting came when I attempted to publish. It can't upload photos to Picasa or MobileMe, only to Flickr. So the only solution was to go and open a Flickr account. Of course you can't open a Flickr account directly anymore, you have to open a Yahoo account. Great, another email account I don't need. Halfway through the Yahoo sign up process I stopped and said to myself, there HAS to be a better way. So I went back to searching and came across a very interesting application, Blogo.

Blogo

Blogo is a new contender in the Mac blogging stakes, and seems to have a very polished, no clutter interface. I say seems because unfortunately it wouldn't run under Snow Leopard, so that ruled it out for me. I mailed them and they were very prompt to reply informing me that they are working on a fix. So I will revisit when the fix is released.

Acceptance of the Flickr

It seems that if you want to do something crazy, like have photos in your blog, then it's a lot easier with Flickr. So I bit the bullet and created a Yahoo account to get a Flickr account. My quest then became, is there an iPhoto plugin for Flicker that will quickly and easily resize and upload selected photos to Flickr? Thankfully there is, the Free Flickr exporter iPhoto Plugin (FFXporter), which does the job nicely. Once I embraced the Flickr, I revised MarsEdit and discovered it has quite nice support for Flicker, and the lack of resizing isn't a problem if I resize when I upload from iPhoto.

Conclusion

Having gone through the above, my workflow for a blog post with photos is as follows

Select photos in iPhoto and export to Flickr, resizing on the way with FFXporter.

Write the blog using MarsEdit, and include photos from Flicker.

Publish to Blogger.com within MarsEdit

Workable, but not quiet the seamless experience I would like. I think blogging software has a bit to go before it reaches maturity. Or am I wrong??

Damian

Comments

So, to mark my imminent move to indy-pendance as a full time freelance iPhone developer I've decided to start a blog to record my progress and lessons learned along the way. I don't expect that anyone will actually read this, but you never know. Mainly I'm writing this for myself. I find that writing about something helps me clarify my thoughts.

I'll be writing about iPhone development and related happenings, software development in Ireland, and whatever else takes my fancy.