I’m happy to announce MarsEdit 1.1.4, which includes a number of minor fixes, and adds support for “New Blogger” weblogs which use Gmail authentication.

Actually quite a lot of little changes went into this, making it a pretty significant update. The Blogger support was top on my priorities, but as I was working on that, little fixes popped up left and right, so I made as many of them as I could.

• Blogger Support! Autodetect of a Blogspot blog should now detect “New Blogger”
• RPC Log Fixes
  • Add more RPC detail to the log
  • Increased maximum size of RPC Console log for debugging large fetches
• Weblog Settings Fixes
  • Fix keyboard tab-cycle in Weblog editor dialog
  • Fix autodetection for Blogger & WordPress
  • Minor changes to layout of dialog
  • Be sure to always use latest dialog edits when “Auto-detecting”
• Enclosure Editor
  • Minor changes to layout of enclosure editing sheet
  • Fix bug with Enclosure URLs involving 302 redirects
• Changes to Help
  • Fix indexing
  • Add information about “New Blogger” type setup
  • Add top-level link to “Getting Started” page
• Bookmarklet changes
  • Fix to handle 2-byte characters and other non-ASCII correctly
  • Add support for advanced “marsedit:” URL parameter “&weblog=BlogName”
• Autosave improvements
  • Mark rescued documents as dirty to avoid accidental loss
  • Fix a problem where autosave document could get stuck and always cause warning
• Blosxom Specific
  • Improve performance on Blosxom blogs with lots of directories/files
• Miscellaneous
  • Fix bug preventing drag-reordering a weblog to top of weblog list
  • Update “Starting a Weblog” window to simplify choices for new users
  • Fix a crash that could occur connecting to an unsupported blog system
  • Fix a small memory leak in Keychain password retrieval
  • Fix the blog editor window to – Make sure the “advanced” tabs go away when switching a post to a less feature-ful blog

Wow – that was a lot! I have to admit I’m a little bit nervous, but I think overall the release is going to be a lot more reliable and stable for people, especially those just getting started.

Please let me know if anything comes up.

Update: I forgot to mention that the fix for UTF-8 characters in the bookmarklet was accelerated by looking at the bookmarklet for WebnoteHappy. It was doing things correctly and I … was not. Thanks Luis for providing a ready example that lead me down the right track!

This is an experiment and we’ll see whether it takes, but if you want to chat about MarsEdit with myself and other passionate users, join us on irc.freenode.net in the ##marsedit channel (note it’s important to use the TWO ## as the beginning of the group name).

In case you’ve been asleep for the past two years, you should know that many, many people are excited about TextMate, or as I like to call it, “emacs 2.0” (joke slightly spoiled by the fact that emacs is currently at version 21.x).

People who love TextMate tend to want to do as much of their text editing as possible in that editor. This means blog-editing, too. I know of at least three approaches that people are using to achieve this, each involving varying levels of UI polish and blogging-system support.

MarsEdit And TextMate

The first technique is to simply use MarsEdit’s “Edit With External Editor” command. This allows you to start a new post in MarsEdit, press Cmd-J, and be off and editing in TextMate. Just set TextMate as your external editor in MarsEdit’s preferences.

This trick also works well with in other editors such as BBEdit, where people also tend towards residing permanently.

The SteamSHIFT blog recently wrote about this technique, also describing a bundle which can be installed to allow “external editing” from any Cocoa application to TextMate.

BlogMate

The next approach is BlogMate, a brand new TextMate plugin from Todd Ditchendorf. It’s a step down from MarsEdit in terms of UI bells and whistles, but has the advantage of being free and working directly inside TextMate.

BlogMate uses TextMate’s plugin architecture to allow a custom UI panel to appear while editing a blog post in TextMate. From it you can choose the post to edit, set categories, etc.

It’s worth noting that BlogMate only supports the MetaWeblog API, so it won’t work with all blogs. Oh, and as Todd points out, it’s vaporware (meaning it’s not available to the public yet). But it will be interesting to watch it evolve.

TextMate Blogging Bundle

Lowest on the list in terms of user interface is the TextMate Blogging Bundle, written by Brad Choate. This is the answer for anybody who would just as soon configure most of their blog settings with text, and only see a minimum of UI feedback (most of the feedback is by way of “Help Tag” style floating windows).

The Blogging Bundle appears to be standard issue with the latest versions of TextMate. So the good news is if you’re a TextMate fan, you’ve probably already got this installed and at your command. Just check it out from the Bundles menu.

This solution also, for the time being anyway, only supports the MetaWeblog API.

Which To Choose?

Whichever makes you happiest, of course. A number of factors may play into your decision. Price, convenience, and blog API support among them. I’d like MarsEdit to be irresistible to you, but if you’ll be happier with another solution, that’s where I want you to go!

As I mentioned in my last post, Really Simple Discovery is a mechanism by which blog editors (such as MarsEdit) can programmatically obtain information about the publishing APIs a particular blog supports.

Most of the “big blogs” support this feature, albeit to varying degrees of usefulness. Take a look at the source code to this page, if you’re reading it on the web. You’ll see near the top of the page a line like this:

<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/xmlrpc.php?rsd” />

See the href= section? That’s pointing at a separate URL where my blog advertises information about how it can be programmatically edited. The idea is the user gives MarsEdit a simple home page URL, and MarsEdit can go work out the details of the interaction with the blog, by examining its RSD file.

As you can probably imagine, my new role as the principal developer of a popular weblog-publishing application, requires me to be pretty familiar with this format and with the contents of RSD files on various sites. It hasn’t taken me long to get sick of manually looking up the RSD for a particular page, and loading it in a separate window. I want to see the RSD, and I want to see it now!

Show RSD

Go ahead, click it. You should see an alert appear with the content’s of my blog’s RSD file displayed. Better yet, if you’re in the unusual position of needing to look at these things all the time, you can drag the above link to your bookmarklet bar, for convenient access whenever you’re staring at a blog you’d like to discover.

Personally I tend not to use bookmarklets, preferring to package up the JavaScript in an AppleScript so that I can easily attach it to a keyboard shortcut with FastScripts. From now on it’s Cmd-Opt-R for RSDs in Safari.

Credit: The Bookmarklet contains code from Apple’s excellent documentation on the subject of XMLHTTPRequest. My first time using the handy little beast!