The fact that Ecto posted my entries with a seemly random publication date, I have decided to continue my search for a good blog authoring tool. Today I am playing with MarEdit. MarsEdit seems to strive to be similar to an email client. The first thing that I notice is that MarsEdit does not have a Rich Text editor. You manipulate the HTML directly. While I like the freedom of modifying the HTML text, I would prefer to have a Rich Text editor.

Now MarEdit does have a combo box that list a number of HTML tags. By using the HTML tags tool, it does make it easy to add HTML tags. My main concern at this time is how to insert images. The HTML tags combo box does have a insert image item. So maybe it will help. Lets try it out.

So far so pretty good. I was able to select a picture and the pictures alignment. When I pressed the Ok button, MarEdit took care of sending the image to the server.

The image is a picture of my four children. The picture was taken the same day that my youngest son was born. August 25, 2006.

MarsEdit has a Preview option (so did Ecto). The Preview window has a live preview option. The live preview option allow you to see the entry in WSYWIG. The question I have is why not put that in the editor? Also after adding the image, I noticed that every keystroke I type in the editor cases the preview window to refresh. Which causes the image to redraw over and over. It was very annoying, so I had to close the window :-( . I have not turned off the live preview, and I notice that the image still flicker when I scroll the preview window. Very annoying.

Well now it the lime to publish.

Publishing Results Well the good thing is that the entry was published and immediately appeared. That is good. However, again the new line characters where not replaced with HTML line break tags. Before editing I thought that I set the option to convert line break to tags. I will try it again.

When I inserted the image, I specified that I did not want the image to have an alignment. I just realized that MarEdit defaulted the image to be left aligned. That is not good. I had to update the HTML by hand.

Well that did not work either. I just gave up and added the paragraph characters myself. All and All I like Ecto better.