As I noted last year, when Squarespace released version 6 of their popular web hosting service, they opted not to continue supporting 3rd party blog editors such as MarsEdit.

Luckily for fans of MarsEdit who were already hosting with Squarespace version 5, they left support in place, and it has remained mostly functional for the past several months.

A few weeks ago, the API support for Squarespace 5 stopped abruptly, but then resumed. Last week, the service stopped again, and has yet to be restored.

I have been in touch with Squarespace through their regular support channels, but they do not yet seem to appreciate the scope of the problem. In short: all Squarespace customers who rely upon 3rd party editors (not just MarsEdit) that use the API interface, were met with a sudden stoppage of functionality for those apps. The reason? The API through which the service is provided suddenly stopped working and instead redirects to a 404 landing page:

http://www.squarespace.com/process/service/PostInterceptor

To seamlessly restore API service for all Squarespace 5 customers, they need to “flip the switch back on” for this API, so that it connects customers with 3rd party clients in to their sites.

Squarespace’s customer support team has been patient while I try to explain the scope of the problem, and did share with me a workaround that I believe will allow all MarsEdit customers to “fix” their configurations in MarsEdit, regardless of whether they ultimately decides to fix the problem for all customers. To get things back to normal for your Squarespace 5 blog in MarsEdit:

1. Open MarsEdit
2. Click the Squarespace blog icon in MarsEdit’s main window.
3. Select Blog -> Edit Settings from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
4. Change the API Endpoint URL to:

   http://five.squarespace.com/process/service/PostInterceptor

   Note that this is identical to the malfunctioning URL with the exception that the “www.” has changed to “five.”

5. Close the settings window and Refresh the blog to confirm it works.

Note that because of another nuance of Squarespace’s API, if you are configuring a Squarespace 5 blog from Scratch in MarsEdit, you will be met with a confusing error message when it first tries to connect: “Internal Server Error.” This indicates that you need to manually enter your username and password. Select the blog in the main window again, and then choose Blog -> Enter Password from the menu bar.

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