I’ve been telling anybody who will listen, since even before I acquired MarsEdit, that if you want to be a significant member of the Mac developer community, you need to have a blog. In fact, you need a blog even if you’re not a Mac developer. It’s good for your business, it’s good for your social life, and it can even be good for your ego. You don’t have to use MarsEdit to write it, but you need to have one. Case closed.

And if you’ve been slow to pick up the habit, you better get moving. People from all professions and social circles are learning how important blogging is to staying connected in our modern digital world. Kevin O’Keefe is a former trial lawyer who is now trying to impress upon other lawyers the importance of marketing yourself on the web, with his own blog: Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

That’s right. Even the lawyers are blogging now. The “no duh” wisdom of starting a blog is spreading like wildfire. You have to ask yourself now if you’re involved with technology, do you want your lawyer to have a blog before you do?

My friend Oliver Brown once related to me some wisdom he had learned, I believe from his grandmother: “Everybody has at least one novel in them.” And the same is more than true when it comes to blogs. There’s a successful blog in you, you just need to figure out what it is. So what are you waiting for?

Here are common excuses I hear for not blogging, and my reaction to them:

Excuse: “Nobody reads/will read my blog…”

Well, duh. That’s because you haven’t written anything in 3 months, and the last time you did, it was about what you ate for breakfast. You can write more often and you can choose a topical area to focus on. What’s amazing about the web is it truly is so huge and there are so many people hungry for content, that your blog will gain a readership as long as you keep working at it.

Excuse: “I don’t have anything to say…”

If you can’t think of anything interesting to say, you might have to face the sad possibility that you’re not an interesting person. But that’s almost certainly not true. You just need to figure out what you do that’s interesting, and then share it.

Perhaps what makes you interesting is the way you solve programming bugs on the Mac, or perhaps it’s your extensive knowledge of postage stamps. Every time you get excited about something and wish you could share your discovery with somebody, the blog is your answer.

Maybe you share it with the world, or maybe you just share it with your close friends and family. Lots of people these days run more than one blog. A professional blog. A baby blog. A hobby blog. A humor blog. What makes you special? Who can you keep in touch with, educate, or entertain by way of a blog?

Excuse: “I’m not a very good writer…”

Blogs are conventionally prose-oriented, but there’s no reason they need to be exclusively so. If what you have to share is visual, then post photos or drawings to your blog. If you’re a wonderful orator, start a podcast (just another word for an audio blog). Perhaps your talent is writing one-line humorous quips; nobody says your blog entries need to be longer than one sentence! Math nerd? How about a “Proof of the Week” blog, or similar puzzling challenges for your readers?

Excuse: “I can’t blog because my employer won’t let me…”

First of all, what you do in your personal time is your business. If you’ve convinced yourself that your job can be jeopardized by engaging in a social life outside your company, then I’m really sad for you and your situation. Sucks to be you!

What’s more likely is you simply can’t blog specifically about what you’re working on. So what? Is that all you have to share with the world? Even if you can’t blog about the specifics of your work, I’m betting you can find oblique topics that relate your experiences with those of other people.

And if you’re really, truly scared for your job? Don’t blog under your real name. Sites like Blogger and WordPress make it a snap to set up a free blog that is very difficult to trace back to you. How do you think Fake Steve Jobs got away with his shenanigans for so long?

Excuse: “I don’t have time to blog…”

There’s a reason I put this one last. You’ve read this far through my blog? Don’t you have better things to do!? If you’re spending time reading other peoples’ blogs then you’ve obviously set aside some time in your busy schedule to engage with the world blogging community. The fact that you’re spending all that time listening and none of it speaking is just a matter of allocation. Join the conversation.

Lots of people don’t realize how little time it can take to run a blog. With modern publishing systems, adding new content is literally as easy as typing it into a text field and clicking “Send,” or “Publish,” or “Save.”

You’ve just got to take the leap and start your first blog. Once you do, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

If you’re running your own business and receiving a majority of your payments via PayPal (or if you make so much money that even a minority is a lot of cash), then you need to know about something called PayPal’s Merchant Rate.

I first learned about this from Andy Kim, who wrote to the macsb mailing list with a link to an article similar to this one, by Nathaniel Brown. The bottom line? If you bring in more than $3000/month via PayPal, then you’re probably getting charged more than you need to for your transactions.

The basic rate for PayPal transactions in the US is 2.9% + $0.30. If you bring in more than $3000/month, that rate goes down to 2.5%, and if you bring in $10,000/month (lucky you!) the rate goes down to 2.2%.

PayPal’s rates are publicly disclosed, and it’s pretty obvious that the rate gets lower as you make more money. So why am I posting this? Why did Nathaniel post about it? Why did Andy send the link out to the mailing list? Because there’s one extremely annoying, extremely important gotcha: you have to ask for the discount in order to get it.

Yep, even if you’re bringing in $95,000/month, earning PayPal thousands in commissions, they will patiently charge you the maximum rate until you go out of your way to apply for your discount. And when you do, it only affects transactions from that point forward.

So if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, chances are you’ve been getting ripped off for months or years, and don’t know it.

To apply for the discount, follow these “simple” steps:

1. Login to your business PayPal account.
2. Click the “Fees” link at the very bottom of the page.
3. Click the link in the fees schedule that says “1.9%-2.9% + 0.30”.
4. Find and click the link to “Apply” for merchant pricing.

If your experience is like mine, your application will be automatically approved based on your PayPal revenues from the last calendar month. Since the rate you get is determined rather crudely from those revenues, if you expect this month to be much better than last month, then you might wait until next month to make the application.

In any case, if you make more than $3000/month from PayPal, this is a very easy step that will save you $12/month (or much, much more) in fees. Enjoy!

I remember using that “Bounce” command in Mail.app a few times many years ago. My intentions were good: to convince spammers that my email doesn’t exist and they shouldn’t bother. But I always sort of wondered whether it was worth it, and whether I would sufficiently fool the sender that my email address no longer existed, or whether it would just indicate that I was alive and actively looking at spam before bouncing it.

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.

Speaking of SpamSieve, I should read the manual one of these days. You install it, you train it, and then it basically just works. So it’s easy to forget about it and never bother really exploring all of its features. I recently discovered that SpamSieve logs every decision it makes along with some pretty interesting information about why it made it. So if you ever spot a misjudged spam or ham message, take a look at the log message for some interesting details about why it may have happened. (Then train it so SpamSieve learns how to remedy its error).

PS SpamSieve satellite tool for UNIX servers pretty please. If I could run SpamSieve on the server, and administer the corpus remotely from my Mac, I’d be an extremely happy camper. This would also be a killer feature for many iPhone owners.

Update: Michael is on a tear today with good SpamSieve tips. His note about spam forged from “me” may be inspired by a question I asked him a few days ago, where spam was being automatically let through from one of my many business addresses. Simply adding the address to the “Me” card in Address Book fixed the problem!

Time for another MarsEdit update. This time I’ve addressed some issues with the Text Markup menu. The major change is to add a redundant version of the menu to the Post menu in the menu bar. This will ensure that the shortcuts are available even if you don’t have the toolbar visible in a post window.

If you occasionally find yourself wanting to repeat a particular markup macro, and it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut of its own, you’ll enjoy the new “Again” markup menu item (inspired by Guy Kawasaki). Just press Cmd-Y to repeat whatever markup macro you last invoked.

Other changes are a bit more subtle, but for some of you will be particularly welcome. Fixes for Blogger and Movable Type users address minor nuisances, and some other minor tweaks that may affect all users.

Complete details:

• Markup Changes
  • “Do Again” item for markup menu – repeats last applied item
  • Add Text Markup menu to main menu (fixes issues with markup macros when toolbar is hidden)
  • Better support for Return, Arrow keys, and F-Keys in markup shortcuts
• List recent dates as relative, e.g. “Yesterday, 3:30 PM”
• Fix false warning of empty categories when only a new category is set
• Add some missing French localized strings
• Don’t bounce icon when editing in external editor
• Movable Type Specific
  • Fix bug causing _1 being appended to slugs
• Blogger Specific
  • Improve formatting display for <br /> tags in Blogger posts