One of the most-viewed entries to this blog is MarsEdit versus MacJournal, a months-old entry which continues to show up among my most-viewed entries every week. I’m sure those hits come from people who don’t know me, and just happened to google “Mars Edit versus MacJournal” and found that entry. That’s OK, of course — everyone’s welcome here.
For those of you who missed the original post, I compared these two programs as tools to help me manage mirrored blogs on WordPress and Livejournal. Both applications claim to support both, so I ran trial versions to see which might work for me.
I now follow-up that earlier post only because I thought the end result of my comparison of the two products might be of interest to some of those reading that earlier post. I’ll probably edit a link to this follow-up within the earlier post.
Of the two programs, I thought MarsEdit was overall the better-designed application, but it had the fatal flaw of not supporting tags within Livejournal. MacJournal had other weaknesses that made my decision not just a matter of deciding which tool I preferred to use for the job, but a realization that neither really did it properly. Yes, I could use MarsEdit to manage the dual entries in WP and LJ, then manually log into LJ and add the tags, but that was no easier than what I was already doing. In my final appraisal, neither MarsEdit and MacJournal offered any improvement over my existing workflow, which is to make entries in WordPress via the web interface, edit everything to my liking, publish it, then copy-paste the raw HTML into Livejournal’s web interface.
This method is a bit more “manual” than what I’d hoped for, but it has the advantage of being completely cross-platform (MarsEdit and MacJournal are both Mac-only) and location-independent. I can blog from any computer with an internet connection.
I wouldn’t rule out taking another look at MarsEdit, but my sense is that enhanced LJ support in that application is not forthcoming. The developer seems to consider LJ a fading platform, and though I don’t know whether user statistics support that impression, my own gut feeling doesn’t contradict it. Most likely, I will just continue the same way I’ve been doing it, as long as I’m maintaining two mirrored blogs.
Pingback: MarsEdit versus MacJournal observations « [ GriffinWords ]