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Bleg: Good Blog Writers for Mac?
Saturday, February 16th, 2008Jim’s right, for all the nice things about WordPress, it’s photo capabilities are pretty crappy. The alignment functions are pretty crappy. You can’t adjust dimensions or resize. And for some reason, on Firefox, whenever I insert a photo or video into a post, the text bumps right up against the object. Yeah, I can go in and insert some HTML for separation, but it’s a pain.
So does anyone know of a good blog writer that has better photo editing? Jim seems to like Windows Live Writer, but I’m on a Mac. I actually like Mars Edit for its simplicity, but again, the image tools are pretty minimal.
Ecto is the best I have found. It has great features and the developer is very hands on with support.
A well designed stylesheet (CSS) could eliminate most if not all of the problems with image alignment and margins for photos. Talk to you web designer and see if he can’t come up with something. Ideally, there should be no layout info in the content of the post - the stylesheet should handle that, so that you achieve a consistent look and feel (and if you ever want to change that look and feel, your posts’ content are not tied to a particular layout scheme).
And WP’s rich text editor most certainly *does* allow for photo resizing.
Just want to ditto both of the above - check out Ecto and see if it works for you.
WRT well formed CSS, I mostly agree - it should handle about 80% of your formatting transparently, if well designed. There will still be cases where you have to inline style things - there always are. But that’s why there is that C (cascading) in the abbreviation.
Jeremy –
You’re right, it does. For some reason, I can’t post videos in the rich text editor. They don’t upload correctly. So I usually just turn it off. And of course, when it’s off, there’s no photo resizing. Just need to remember to toggle back over when I need to resize.
And I like what I see with Ecto so far.
Client-side, Ecto and MarsEdit are pretty much your two WYSIWYG choices on OS X, which is why I do my blogging on my Windows box. However, if you’ve the technical sort and like adventure, you might be comfortable using the Blogging bundle in Textmate. Unfortunately, all of them cost precious, precious dollars (although for some of us Textmate is worth it).
Some people swear by the Performancing add-on for Firefox, but I have had trouble with it myself.
Just add margin-right:5px to the style attribute of the image. That’ll put a 5 pixel buffer next to the image.
Skitch is free and works great with Mars Edit.
Are you using the rich text editor in WordPress? You should see a series of buttons just above the text-entry box. If not, you can turn it on in your profile in the admin section.
In visual mode, you can resize images by grabbing the edges and dragging. If you click the picture edit icon (the little tree in above the text area) you get to choose from 9 different alignments, set exact dimensions for the image, enter alt text, and define how much space you want around the image both vertically and horizontally.
Add hspace=10 to your image posts. Like I did in posting this image.