After two tumultuous months grappling with Tumblr’s new API while fielding confused feedback from customers about MarsEdit’s sudden lack of support for the service, I’m happy to announce that MarsEdit 3.5.6 restores support for Tumblr. This is a free update for all registered MarsEdit customers, and can be downloaded directly from the MarsEdit home page. Customers who purchased through the Mac App Store can use the direct-download version immediately, or wait until Apple approves the App Store version.

While I was under the hood, so to speak, I addressed a long-standing issue with Tumblr where edits to posts would cause Tumblr to reset the date of the post to the current date and time. I am now working around the issue by explicitly restating the published-on date when I submit an edit to Tumblr.

Another date-related fix is in MarsEdit’s handling of dates that are set on draft posts. Previously, to change the date for a post e.g. to the future, you would have to edit the date and immediately send it to the blog. The “edited date” is now saved with the local draft in MarsEdit so if you’re working on a post that is slated to be “scheduled” you can set the date to the future early in your edits.

Here is the complete list of minor fixes that went into this update:

MarsEdit 3.5.6

• Restore Tumblr support by adapting to their latest API changes
• Adapt to Flickr’s recent requirement to use OAuth for authentication
• Add support for 10.8 user notifications
• Fix an issue where Flickr browser’s number of photos shown didn’t match popup selection
• Fix an issue where some embed and object HTML attributes were being stripped in rich editor
• Fix an issue where edits to Tumblr posts caused publish date to reset to current time
• Fix an issue where editing a post’s date didn’t save properly in local drafts

I’ll be particularly interested to hear if folks run into any trouble with Tumblr after updating. Thanks for your patience while I worked through this issue.

MarsEdit has supported Squarespace for years, and a number of our mutual customers have come to rely upon the app as a convenient means of managing content for Squarespace sites from the Mac desktop.

It came as a surprise when Squarespace 6 was released earlier this year, that support for 3rd party editors such as MarsEdit was dropped from the service. I had some cordial correspondence with staff at Squarespace, who explained that because of the laudable flexibility of the new version, it’s difficult to provide access to the content with one of the standard blogging APIs that MarsEdit uses to connect to Squarespace 5 and dozens of other services. Of course, as a developer with customers who depend on this support, I was disappointed to learn this.

I have been holding out hope that Squarespace will eventually address the shortcoming. The two possible solutions that leap to my mind are:

1. Somehow get support for one of the standard APIs working with their new engine.
2. Implement an entirely new API, unique to Squarespace, that I could consider implementing support for.

I lean strongly in the direction of #1. Obviously it would be a lot less work for me, and I’m generally cautious about taking on the burden of developing support for yet another all-new, custom API with all of its own nuanced behaviors.

But option #1 would also be better for Squarespace, in that support would be instantly restored to MarsEdit and any other 3rd party clients using the Squarespace 5 API. These XMLRPC APIs, based on the venerable MetaWeblog, are not great. But they are ubiquitous, and implementing support for one of these standards opens the doors to dozens if not hundreds of clients on every conceivable platform.

So I’ve been waiting, and when disappointed customers ask me what can be done to help, I encourage them to drop a line to Squarespace requesting restored support for their XMLRPC-based API. I don’t know if this has had any real impact, but in any case it doesn’t appear to have shifted the status quo. On Twitter today, customer Rob Wells asked Squarespace about the status of such support, starting a conversation that culminated in Squarespace underscoring that they don’t have any near-term plans:

@redsweater @robjwells It is not on our roadmap to provide XML-RPC.

— Squarespace (@Squarespace) September 18, 2012

To Squarespace’s credit they have been polite and receptive to feedback about this. In a follow-up tweet, they gave some cause to remain optimistic about future developments:

@redsweater @robjwells We’ll keep you guys up to speed on any new developments.

— Squarespace (@Squarespace) September 18, 2012

Whatever the future holds for Squarespace, it’s safe to assume that 3rd party editors will not be supported by Squarespace 6 in the near future. In the mean time, users who already have Squarespace 5 sites should keep their site as it is if they want to continue using MarsEdit. New customers who are intrigued by Squarespace but want MarsEdit support can still start a new Squarespace 5 site by signing up at the classic site.

And although Squarespace has given a pretty definitive answer for the time being, if you ask me it’s always worth letting them know how you feel. If Squarespace 6 support for 3rd party editors is something you’re dreaming of, let them know how important it is to you.

It’s been two months since Tumblr surprised me by suddenly dropping support for MarsEdit and countless other clients that connect to their service using a previously approved technique with their 1.0 API. This reduced MarsEdit’s functionality to posting only, eliminating the ability to download and edit existing posts. Two weeks ago, they finished the job, by dropping support completely for the 1.0 API. MarsEdit ceased functioning with Tumblr completely.

I’ve been spending a good portion of the past two months reorganizing MarsEdit so that it can accommodate all the new requirements of Tumblr’s API changes. It’s not all “wasted on Tumblr,” so to speak. I’ll gain benefits from having robust OAuth authentication support, for example. In fact, I’m already reusing that support for Flickr’s new preference to authenticate with OAuth. But it’s been an unwanted, unexpected shift of my priorities, and I’ll be glad when it’s over.

It’s almost over.

I’ll be honest: there were times along this latest sprint to support Tumblr when I thought of throwing in the towel. Why should I continue to shed proverbial sweat and tears for a service that has shown little concern for me? I’m not doing it for Tumblr, I’m doing it for my users. I sold MarsEdit to many, many people who rely upon it to connect to and edit their Tumblr blogs. It’s within my power to restore that functionality, so that is what I feel compelled to do.

On a side note: although Tumblr as a company has shown disdain for its API clients, I have recently received great support from one of their employees, John Bunting, who responds fairly diligently to developers on the Tumblr API Google group. He doesn’t always have great news to share, but he often does what he can to help.

I’m finishing up MarsEdit 3.5.6, which will restore support for Tumblr. While I was in there I was able to shore up a couple other long-standing shortcomings with MarsEdit’s Tumblr support: you can now edit completely private blogs and private posts, and MarsEdit now works around a Tumblr API behavior where editing a post would always change the publish date to now.

If you are interested in trying out the latest changes before 3.5.6 officially ships, I would be pleased to have some sanity checks on the fixes that are in place. Some folks have already been testing a previous beta release, but this one should be even more solid and full of goodness.

Click to Download MarsEdit 3.5.6b3

Let me know how it goes, and thanks for your patience while I worked out the various issues that were preventing me from adopting Tumblr’s latest API.
 

Gus Mueller of Flying Meat is a good friend who, for a short time, even worked on MarsEdit. Much to my chagrin, Gus doesn’t actually use MarsEdit for editing his own blogs. When I’ve asked him why, he explains that he’s too tied to a particular setup involving VoodooPad, his desktop wiki app.

To make things worse, he’s finally made his blogging solution public! You can read all about static publishing with VoodooPad on the Flying Meat site. There goes the neighborhood.

Although MarsEdit supports static publishing, I have to confess it’s pretty minimal compared to the support for hosted blog services such as WordPress and Blogger. MarsEdit support is all built around the old “Blosxom” publishing convention. If you’re interested, Dan Weeks has a good write-up about how he used this support to connect MarsEdit with Octopress.

Although static publishing isn’t a top priority for MarsEdit today, I’ll be considering enhancements that would give more flexibility and power to these setups. In the mean time if MarsEdit doesn’t fit your needs, I strongly encourage you to check out Gus’s new stuff in VoodooPad!