Three apps for easy blogging on the Mac

After writing a post recently, about a Dior watch for men, it suddenly occurred to me how it had taken less than fifteen minutes to write the post, embed the picture, check for errors and then post it on the blog.

This is a far cry from the 30 to 60 minutes it used to take me to update from our WordPress blogging back-end. Let’s just say that, for all its virtues, using the WordPress backend several times a day can be a pretty harrowing experience. And on the rare occasion when one is expected to live-blog an event–WEF, Budget, Election, Anna Hazare–I am quickly driven to substance abuse to help me cope.

Not any more. I now do most of my personal and professional blogging from a Mac computer and usually have to use no more than three apps to get things done. One of which largely runs in the background. This is a quick run-through of the apps and why I love them so much…

1. MarsEdit

This is an excellent desktop blogging application that helps you compose and publish posts directly onto several blogging platforms: WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, TypePad and so on. Once MarsEdit is set up on a computer, writing and publishing posts is almost as easy as writing and saving on any popular word processor such as MS Word.

Somehow I find the idea of just opening an app and directly composing a blogpost most appealing. MarsEdit’s interface is free of clutter, fuss and mundane pop-up windows. And while there are a handful of settings you could tweak with if you want to get technical, it works well straight out of the box too. The only bit that can get a little confusing for new users is embedding multimedia, such as Youtube videos. For this you need to switch between two editing modes–Rich Text and HTML. (Which is what you would do on the WordPress backend as well.) But once you get the hang of how to do that, the app is pretty powerful.

My complaints with MarsEdit, for now, include things like being unable to caption pictures, and not having a preview window that works like Windows Live Writer. (Which automatically picks up your designs from your blog for more accurate previewing.)

MarsEdit is a $39.99 app for a single-user, multiple-computer license. And it comes with a 30-day free full-featured preview. If you blog frequently and on multiple blogs–and can’t stand the site of code–the investment is well worth it.

2. Dropic

While I do embed the odd YouTube video or PDF file in my posts, most of my embeds are usually pictures. The most sophisticated thing I do with pictures is resize them. (And occasionally crop them.) I’ve been using Dropic lately to take the pain completely out of resizing images. Just drag and drop an image onto the Dropic window and KABOOM, you have a resized image.

Dropic comes with four sizes pre-built into the system. (There is a way to change these presets. But I haven’t figured out how to do that. Or found a reason to.) I just convert everything into medium size. That usually works with all my blogs.

If you want slightly more sophisticated image editing on your computer and would rather not use the heavy-ish applications that are pre-loaded on your Mac try SeaShore. I am usually easily befuddled by image editing apps. But SeaShore intimidates me less than most.

3. DropBox

And finally there is DropBox, the swiss army knife of the internet-enabled. I’ve written about DropBox in glorious terms before, so I won’t go ovser its awesomeness again. But what I love about DropBox when it comes to blogging is the ability to make publicly accessible image files on the fly. Drop an image onto the Dropic window, save the output inside DropBox folder and in moments you have a web-ready image file you can embed in your post.

Now in most cases MarsEdit lets you upload images along with your post to the web. But often the Livemint blogs gets all temperamental and refuses to play ball. What I do then is to use proceed as usual while composing the post and then, just before uploading, I switch to HTML mode, and replace all the image links with DropBox public URLs. This way no files are uploaded, your WordPress install acts with dignity, but your photos are served by the DropBox servers and appear normally. (If you find this too complicated, just ask your IT guy to tweak your WordPress install.)

But this is just one of the many cool things you can do with DropBox.

What tricks and tips do you have for the semi-professional or professional blogger? Leave comments please. We could all use all the help we can get.