# Transcript

Shared by Miraz Jordan, https://miraz.me
to accompany the 2023 Micro Camp Presentation: 

Take the Captain’s Chair of your Micro.Blog with the MarsEdit App for Mac: Time Travel, Replicators, Warp Speed and More

Thanks to [Aiko](https://sindresorhus.com/aiko) for the automated transcript.


Captain on the bridge.

Kia ora koutou katoa.

Haere mai.

Take the captain's chair of your microblog with the Mars Edit app for Mac.

It's based on Mars Edit 5 from Red Sweater Software.

I've used Mars Edit for about 20 years now, since the beginning really, so you could say I'm a happy customer.

In fact, earlier this year, I manually moved more than 300 posts from an entirely different blogging system, because it didn't work with Mars Edit and it was really hard to use.

The combination of microblog and Mars Edit is light years ahead.

Captain, we're being hailed.

By the way, don't try to actually read the screenshots in the video.

There's a download packet later where you can zoom in on them.

So let's get ready for liftoff with a bit of setup.

When you add a new blog to Mars Edit, you need to feed in the URL, and then you'll need to flip into microblog and find the app token and paste that in as well.

Having done that, your new blog is set up and ready to go.

I set up a test blog for this demo, and microblog has automatically created a blog post and a few pages for me.

Engineering, are we ready to go?

Under the Mars Edit general settings, you might choose rich text or plain text, the font that you like, whether you like a dark colour scheme or a light colour scheme, and some other factors as well.

And then you can go blog by blog and set the settings that you prefer.

For example, on this blog, I want to download all the posts and pages and all the media items and do that 100 items at a time.

Under the editing tab, I prefer to use markdown.

You might choose something else.

I want my image media to default to full size.

I write in a left to right system.

I like my posts for this blog to default to a published status.

In the publishing section of the blog settings, you can apply some actions to the content before it gets posted to the blog and set up some alerts that I'll come back to later on.

Hey, all systems are nominal.

It's time to get this blog off the ground.

Let's try writing a blog post, for example.

You can do that in the normal kinds of ways.

Use the menu bar or a key command or toolbar to create a new post and just start writing.

Markdown works well.

MarsEdit shows me my typos too.

And down the bottom of the window, keeps a count of words and characters.

Sometimes I prefer to write in HTML.

Try the view menu and show the formatting bar, which brings up some HTML easy commands.

I fixed my typos since the last screenshot and the word and character count at the bottom of the window have updated.

Syntax highlighting shows when you've made errors in the HTML.

I didn't make any.

I'm pretty proud.

Rich text is another option if that's your thing.

You can enter as much or as little text as you like.

One post I wrote recently for my community blog has more than 2000 words.

On my personal blog, I usually stay within the micro blog 300 character limit.

For short text only posts, you might enjoy using the global micro post shortcut.

Check the MarsEdit settings for what that will be.

On my Mac, that's control command P.

Tractor beams and transporters get your images sorted out like a snap.

There's so many possible ways to add one or more photos or files like music, PDFs, videos and so on to a post.

You can copy the image from somewhere and paste it in.

You can drag in a photo or a file.

You can use the upload utility.

You can browse the media manager on your Mac or items previously published on a blog.

Here's the upload utility in action.

It comes up, you can choose a format at the top, some coding to wrap around the image.

And there's a space for the crucial alt text.

Down the bottom of that window, you can choose upload now or upload with post.

We'll come back to that later.

Here on the right is the coding that's been inserted because I chose the figure option for the format.

And down the bottom, well, there's a pretty picture of a banded dotterel.

Put it on the Viewscreen…

Like to check what your post is looking like before you send it off to the blog?

There's a preview window and you can actually customise that window a bit by opening the template editor at the bottom left.

Those instructions that you put in there, the CSS you put in there will only affect that preview window.

It doesn't change how the post actually looks on your blog.

That's been so handy for me.

Checking on how my post will be before I actually send it off.

Time travel.

Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain, I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes.

The future is the past, the past is the future.

It all gives me a headache.

Great news with MarsEdit, you can put those headache pills away.

Use the date picker to set the time of your post in the future, in the past, whatever works for you.

And you can go and change an already published post as well.

No problem.

And of course, you also have the option to save your post as a draft, either online in MicroBlog itself or on your own Mac.

Not a problem.

You can save it as a local draft and come back to it, edit it more later, publish it when you're ready.

Red alert.

Back to those MarsEdit blog settings for a moment.

On my personal blog, I commonly don't have a title and I seldom use a category.

However, on my Waikawa News website, I want to always have a title and always have a category.

So I've set those settings.

If I try to publish something that's missing one of those things, MarsEdit pops up and alerts me.

Very handy.

Writing blog posts, adding images, all that is made a whole lot easier with MarsEdit.

But now look what happens when we get that warp speed up to maximum.

Across three active blogs, I've got more than 5000 posts and pages.

In one of them, somewhere, I mentioned Kea Gyms.

Take a look at the search in MarsEdit.

Three seconds to find a blog post from January 2018 on my Miraz blog.

I challenge you to beat that anywhere.

Time to get the replicator online using formatting macros.

These are so cool.

In the format menu, you can set up text that is just how exactly you want it.

So, for example, it might be the case that I'd like to put a paragraph of a class photos saying Photos by Miraz Jordan and used with permission.

And perhaps I want to use this quite often.

I can go to the formatting macros and customise them.

I can add in that line of text and then it's available for me to choose from that format pop up any time I want.

I've got a dozen or more pieces of text that I've got saved in there.

So what's life like in the captain's chair?

Well, you've got quite a lot of privileges and you can get them mainly from the main window.

Here you see a list of all your blogs in the left hand column and you can use the disclosure triangle to show all the posts and pages separately.

If you click an item in the top, then you get a little preview down the bottom.

You can also click in to see your locally stored drafts.

And if you select a post or a page, you can click that toolbar button or go up to the menu somewhere and choose to actually visit the web page in your default browser for that post or page.

You can sort and customise that main window.

You can add columns and take columns away.

You can click on a column heading to sort by date, category, title, a whole heap of things.

You can choose to delete something from there.

You can double click to edit a post or page.

Of course, you can make a new post or page if you want and control click on an item to copy the published link.

If you select a number of posts in the main window, MarsEdit shows you how many are selected.

And with MarsEdit downloading all your posts and pages and images and other files, if you go to the MarsEdit Help menu and hold down the option key, you'll see an option to open the MarsEdit data folder on your computer in the Finder.

And there you can find all your stuff.

But wait, there's more.

There's a secret control panel down in engineering powered not by the Warp Core, but by AppleScript.

I dug through my AppleScript files and found a few quite interesting ones.

There are several AppleScripts that I routinely use with MarsEdit.

Here are a couple of them.

It's all very well to copy the published link, but sometimes I want that link formatted.

I might like to have the title with it and format it as an HTML link to paste into something.

Or perhaps I'd like it as a markdown link to paste somewhere else.

Or sometimes if I'm sending an email, perhaps I want that link just as the title and dash and then the URL.

These three AppleScripts are all pretty much the same, but they only vary in what they put out ready for you to paste into somewhere else.

I'm a bit fussy about the windows on my computer.

I like them to be just so.

The script on the left lets me arrange my main composition window and preview window just exactly how I like them.

Makes me happy.

Over on the right hand screenshot, I found this AppleScript from 2009.

I don't know what I was doing then.

It would have been with a WordPress blog, but I commonly wanted to duplicate a post to use it as the basis for a new post.

And so this script handled that quite nicely.

It copied the post and then it made a new post and put in all the various bits and bobs of that.

And then back in 2010, I had a client who was only able to email me his blog posts and I would copy the text from the email using this AppleScript.

And the AppleScript would then go ahead, make a new post, make sure it was on the correct blog, put draft in the title area ready for me to assign a title.

It would paste the post into the body.

It would add a couple of categories and tags and set the published status to Draft so that then I could go in and fine tune what I needed to before actually publishing that post.

AppleScript is kind of hard to get into, but people have often made scripts and I'm happy to share any MarsEdit scripts that I've made.

It's just so incredibly useful.

Ahh, the holodeck.

Such a useful alternate universe.

You know, MarsEdit handles text just fine, but it's not a whole dedicated text editor with millions of features and functions.

If you think that you're going to want to edit your text in some sophisticated way, then choose the Edit with editor in the MarsEdit settings.

I've chosen BBEdit because I've used that for years now and it's incredibly powerful.

So you can open a blog post in MarsEdit and under the file menu, you can then choose to open it in your text editor.

And moments later, there it is.

Now you can use the power of your text editor to do whatever sophisticated text things it is that you need to do.

And then when you've finished, simply close and save.

And then it goes right back to MarsEdit ready for you to carry on with the next step of your process.

This is probably particularly helpful with longer blog posts.

I've certainly used it a few times where I've wanted some fairly sophisticated formatting and even to use BBEdit's grep search and replace so that I can search for one term and replace it with something different.

Maybe you'll never use this, but it's there if you need it.

So there you have it.

We've had a good look at writing and editing posts and pages, including markdown, HTML, rich text, the global micropost shortcut, adding and managing images and other files, previewing your posts, saving them as a draft or publishing, editing that publication date and time, and formatting macros for speedier writing.

We've had a look at downloading posts, pages, media, warnings about forgotten titles or categories, using a dedicated external text editor, the lightning fast search, managing multiple blogs, sorting those lists of posts and pages, and supercharging the whole deal with AppleScript.

I'd really like to thank in particular Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software for MarsEdit and Manton, Jean and the others for MicroBlog, of course, and for allowing me to do this presentation.

NASA supplied a bunch of images and Star Trek Voyager's Captain Janeway for the time travel quote.

There's a list of the NASA Mars images in one of the downloads available to you.

To make this presentation, I relied heavily, of course, on MarsEdit and MicroBlog.

I used Apple Keynote, Shottr for screenshots, Audio Hijack for recording sound, and iMovie for gluing it all together.

I've made a download packet available for this presentation where you can more easily zoom in on the screenshots.

There's an accessible PDF which describes the images, a transcript, and some other handy resources as well, including some of those AppleScripts.

E noho rā!