Posting a blog entry can be a little too complicated, especially if you want to include some formatting, a table, or a photo. The built-in editors have gotten friendlier, but you still have to deal with some technical issues.

That’s where a third-party blog client comes in like MarsEdit (which I am typing in at the moment.) I also used to use Ecto but quit a while back. Apparently Ecto was acquired and is now “abandoned-ware.”

I wondered if Mom and Carol would find using a blog client easier than having to remember how to login, write an article and publish it.

I can already tell this would help Carol, because you don’t have to remember to double-return between paragraphs. Now…. let me test a photo. I see a little button at the top in the toolbar called Media. I just created a snapshot of the toolbar. Let’s see i I can put it in this article by clicking on Media:

Well that was easy. I just chose the toolbox image I had saved on my desktop. There was a field I had to fill out called “Section”. Not sure what that was for, I typed “2010”. I’m going to hit publish now and see where that picture goes. Then I’ll come back and edit this some more and publish again.

Be right back…. clicking on that “Send to Blog” button up there….

OK… I’m back. That worked great, although I can see I had several type-o’s. The errors were spelled correctly, so MarsEdit didn’t help me avoid that.

Looks like the “Section” means what directory do you want the image stored in. I’ve started storing images in a root directory with the year. That seems like a good way to keep a bunch of photos and images grouped instead of having them all go in a bunch of spread out months. So the path to the image above is: /2010/mars-edit-toolbar.png.

I see I can also insert an image by using a link to somewhere else on the internet. Let’s test an image from my Skitch library. Clicking on Media again…

Well it wasn’t there. Right-clicking and choosing Format… Image from link…

That worked. Carl from “Up” showed up. I don’t see how I can make him smaller and have a pop-up though. So Carl is not going to end up being an image on my blog, rather I am just showing an image from another server, in this case Skitch.com.

And here’s one from facebook:

So that’s MarsEdit. But it runs on a Mac. Need to look into options for Windows.