From time to time MarsEdit users ask whether there is or will be any support in the application for “automatic crossposting.” While MarsEdit is great for managing multiple blogs from a single interface, it still requires you to manually open separate windows and “send” the post to each of the blogs you want to publish it on. Some users would like to be able to define a “metablog” in MarsEdit and have posts to that destination simulcast to multiple blogs.

I’m hesitant to change the MarsEdit interface to support crossposting more automatically, because I think it would be to the detriment of users who use it for more conventional purposes. But future development plans might make it possible to support crossposting as a “scripted action” that runs whenever you publish to a particular blog.

In the mean time, a great solution is to rig something up on your weblog server. In particular, I know of one plugin for WordPress that automates the process of crossposting from WordPress to LiveJournal. For more details about how this works, see the recent entry from Tycho about his use of the plugin in conjuction with a WordPress blog and LiveJournal.

I was cruising through Daring Fireball’s Linked List today, when I stumbled on the Ironic Sans blog. I was captivated not by the content, which is what motivated John Gruber to link it, but by the stunning visual appearance of the page design.

I have a soft spot for digital media that defies its nature and tries to adopt a more organic appearance. I suspect a lot of people share this aesthetic preference, so it’s ironic (heh, heh) that we don’t see more of it. I suspect the reason we don’t is because it’s really hard to do right.

What’s particularly good about the Ironic Sans blog is that it captures a lot of the clean perfection of digital while still being jaggy and texturized. The banner headline is perfectly legible in spite of its beautifully bleeding hatched fill. Meanwhile, the cross-hatched pattern that frames the page gives a clear border for the more-or-less conventionally faced digital content.

The juxtaposition of pseudo-analog and digital content just, I don’t know, it makes me excited. It makes me want to look at the site for its own sake. In fact, I wrote most of this blog entry before bothering to actually read the content that Gruber had linked to, a geeky encoding of the New York skyline into gray-scale representation of a histogram.

Some of you are probably wondering, if I like this digital defiance so much, why doesn’t Red Sweater’s design embrace it? Well like I said, I think it’s actually really hard to do right. But if I were a designer, I think I’d really enjoy working on this kind of digital design.

Update: Check out the blog post describing Ironic Sans’s design, pointed to in the comments by the site’s designer/author.

Those of you who are using FastScripts with the forthcoming Leopard 10.5 operating system from Apple will want to upgrade to FastScripts 2.3.4, which works better in that environment.

I don’t talk a lot about FastScripts these days, because I’ve been so busy focusing on other applications. But it’s still a really big part of my workflow here, and I don’t know what I would do without it!

Often I get feedback from people who have finally figured out how FastScripts can help them. The recurring theme to this feedback is “I had no idea it could do that!” So let me try to summarize some of FastScripts’s selling points more effectively than the current product page does:

• It lets you open or run (almost) anything, instantly by keystroke. Yes, it supports shell scripts, AppleScripts, applications, Automator actions, and can even open documents for you. Just put them in the Scripts folder.
• Its keyboard shortcuts can replace almost any menu item shortcut in any application, redefining the behavior with a script.
• Its context-specific behavior for Applications lets you define shortcuts for just one app, without affecting other apps.
• It installs in your menu bar, but is not a hack. It’s “just an app.”
• Built-in “On Screen Display” functionality lets you show nifty Growl-style feedback, even if you don’t run Growl.
• Oh yeah, it’s particularly good at running scripts quickly, without taking focus away from your target application, and without frustrating you.

I recently showed off some of my FastScripts tricks to the local CocoaHeads group here in Boston, yielding some oohs and aahs (and one immediate sale!). A lot of people are familiar with the awesome “everything launchers” such as LaunchBar and Quicksilver, but are increasingly less familiar with the benefits of an old-fashioned “macro” setup. I think this “one stroke and you’re done” approach still has a place, and can make you a lot more productive.

The biggest difference between FastScripts and these apps is FastScripts doesn’t strive to be a general-purpose launcher. It’s a paring knife where those apps are a cleaver. Its primary purpose is to alter the landscape of your Mac so that the results you want, in Mail, the Finder, Safari, whatever, are available at the pressing of a single keystroke.

If you’ve upgraded to the recently released WordPress 2.3, you may have noticed that the release brings official support for “native tags.” Tags are familiar to most people who use various social networking sites such as Flickr or Del.Icio.Us, but in the context of blogging it can be a bit confusing because there is often some semantic overlap between a blog server’s use of tags and categories.

In short, categories are typically used more conceptually for organization, while tags are used for identification by whatever keywords seem appropriate. For this reason there is usually a limited number of categories on a blog, while there may be an infinite number of tags.

Many people have asked me when MarsEdit will support the native tags in WordPress 2.3. For once, I’ve got good news that doesn’t require me to release a new version! Thanks to some thoughtful design by the WordPress developers, native tags are already supported.

How do you take advantage of the support? Just show the “Keywords” field for your WordPress 2.3 blog in MarsEdit. You do this by selecting it from the View menu in the main menu bar. Now you can enter tags as a comma-separated list of terms. These will be sent along with your post to the WordPress blog, and if it’s version 2.3 or later, the terms will automatically be incorporated as tags along with the post.

I hope this brings an “unexpected” feature to light for those of you running WordPress. There are obviously improvements I’d like to make in the way MarsEdit handles tags. Obvious things that come to mind are auto-completion and an improved UI for reinforcing the separation between tag terms. But for the short term I think this feature will be very appreciated.