MarsEdit 3.1.3 is out and contains some “finally!” bug fixes, as well as a relatively major shift in the way that Google Blogger type blogs are configured by default.

Improved Rich Text Paste

As I have said before, the Rich Text editor in MarsEdit, as incredible as it is, is a work in progress. One of the things many people have reported since MarsEdit 3 came out is that it can be particularly irritating when it comes to pasting text. Often extra paragraphs would be inserted, and things just seemed generally unreliable. I’m not promising perfection yet, but I think you’ll find it a lot cleaner starting with this update.

Communicating With Blogger

For years, MarsEdit has communicated with Blogger using its standard “Google Atom” interface, which was developed in tandem with the standard AtomPub protocol. Over the past couple years, they have been working on a newer version of the interface which aims to be more compatible with the AtomPub standard. MarsEdit started supporting this in release 3.1.2, and starting with 3.1.3, “Google Data Protocol 2.0” will be the standard means of communicating with Blogger.

The big win for users with this change is it should lead to more reliable preservation of HTML markup in your posts. But I don’t want to jump the gun and shift everybody over to it just yet, so I’m only defaulting newly configured Blogger blogs to use the new protocol for now.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can switch your previously-configured Blogger blog to use the new protocol. Just open up the blog settings in MarsEdit, switch to the “General” pane, and select “Google Data Protocol 2.0” from the System API popup. Then refresh your blog to make sure you get a fresh copy of all your recent posts.

Local Draft Duplicates

One of the major annoyances people run into with MarsEdit is a creeping number of extra draft copies in the “Local Drafts” area. I have been tackling this problem for years, and I think I finally found one of the last, if not the last cause of the problem. If you’ve been running into this, delete all the cruft now and hopefully it will stay tidier going forward!

Change Log

Most of this was discussed in detail above, but in case you want a definitive list of the user-facing changes that come with 3.1.3, here it is!

• Improvements to paste functionality in Rich Editing mode
• Avoid a bug where saved local-drafts were not deleted after publishing
• Fix a bug that caused custom field values to go blank while editing a post
• Blogspot-specific changes
  • Newly configured blogs now default to GData 2.0 protocol, fixing some HTML formatting issues
  • Fixes to GData 2.0 protocol to allow edit date, categories, etc.

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