Blog faster, blog better

Love to blog but hate the hassle? MarsEdit to the rescue! Forget working in clunky web-based editors: this blog-publishing powerhouse gives you a fast, elegant editor that works online or off, organises all your articles and publishes directly to hosting services.

What we love: How easy it is to get blogging. Just add your sites (WordPress, Tumblr, Movable Type, Typepad and many more services are supported) and MarsEdit downloads existing posts – which is convenient if you ever need to update an article. Create a new post by using the WYSIWYG editor to add a title, tags, body text, and images; the live preview (View > Show Preview) displays what your published post will look like. When you’re finished, send articles and updates directly to your blogs with a click.

Quick tip: MarsEdit includes a slew of features tailor-made for blogging veterans. Prefer to edit in plain text? Markdown and HTML syntax highlighting make it easy to see formatting and tags. Fan of microposting? A systemwide keyboard shortcut lets you instantly create and publish text-only posts. Writing about a website? The MarsEdit Safari extension creates a new draft using the current URL and any text you’ve selected. Working offline? You can create and edit posts anywhere, then publish when you have a connection.

Meet the creator: Boston–based developer Daniel Jalkut was born and raised in California. MarsEdit started out as a built-in feature of the popular Mac RSS reader NetNewsWire but quickly evolved into its own app, later acquired by Jalkut’s Red Sweater Software. One of his favourite MarsEdit features is Perfect Preview, which lets you add blog-specific templates for more accurate article previews.