Blogging updates…

• Posted: January 31, 2008
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• Author: Christina
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• Filed under: wordpress/website
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• Tags: design, modifications, themes, web site

My blog will be getting a minor facelift. No, nothing radical -- I'll just be updating to the latest version of Chris Murphy's awesome design...

Well, that was a vague post title, no? My blog will be get­ting a minor facelift. No, noth­ing rad­i­cal — I’ll just be updat­ing to the lat­est ver­sion of Chris Mur­phy’s awe­some theme. Because I’ve made mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the col­or, some of the side­bar ele­ments and oth­er minor tweaks, it’ll take me some time to get the CSS changed (the stylesheet was changed too sub­stan­tial­ly for me to just cut/paste, so I’ll have to change the col­ors and stuff by hand — not a prob­lem, I just have to remem­ber every­thing I did to get the cur­rent ver­sion look­ing like it looks now).

I’m still try­ing to test every­thing on my MAMP set-up before uploading/going live, but I’ll need to put the blog in Main­te­nance Mode for reals this time (even if it does piss Lisa off and make her google “that bitch Christi­na War­ren” a bunch of times) to make sure it looks good. It’ll prob­a­bly be at a time when the five of you that read this (and I love each and every one of you) are not online, but I’m just putting that out there.

Also speak­ing of updates, Mars Edit 2.1 was released today and the updates are fan­tas­tic! Last week, when I wrote my lit­tle impromp­tu post com­par­ing Ecto and MarsEd­it, I was for­tu­nate enough to be vis­it­ed by the devel­op­ers of both projects, offer­ing feed­back (and in Ecto’s case, infor­ma­tion about how to get the pro­gram to do what I want­ed it to do in the first place). While I feel com­pelled to give Ecto anoth­er try, I bought MarsEd­it on the spot because my tri­al was almost up and I felt very sat­is­fied with the soft­ware.

If I was sat­is­fied last week, this week I am thrilled! There have been a few changes, that just in typ­ing up this post, have become imme­di­ate­ly ben­e­fi­cial. The first change is an update to how the tag­ging sys­tem appears visu­al­ly. Ecto’s tag han­dling was where I fault­ed it the most, and the fact that MarsEd­it did tag­ging, and did it cor­rect­ly was huge. Now it’s even bet­ter. Tags pop up on the tag bar in self-con­tained bub­bles, very Mac-like, very ele­gant.

The biggest change, for me, is the fact that markup com­mands are now acces­si­ble from a con­text menu with­in the edi­tor. instead of hav­ing to remem­ber the short­cut (which for things like bold or ital­ic is fine, but for oth­er stuff takes time to learn, and I have too many short­cuts clut­ter­ing my brain), I can just right-click and insert — which may sound triv­ial, but the dif­fer­ence is I don’t have to change how I’m look­ing at my text, pause, click on the markup menu, insert, and then pick up typ­ing. Instead I can either ctrl-click or right click from the the mouse/trackpade and select my option. Awe­some.

Appar­ent­ly there is some­thing about sav­ing drafts on the serv­er too. That could be cool, but I real­ly don’t have any need for that. If I was con­stant­ly on var­i­ous com­put­ers, that would be one thing, but for right now, I’m using this pri­mar­i­ly from one space, and that does­n’t make my pro­duc­tiv­i­ty any bet­ter. Oh. The pre­view tem­plate is bet­ter now too. I don’t ever wor­ry about what my post is going to look like, but as I start embed­ding more graph­ics and videos, I can see that being help­ful.

So, theme update should be up by tomor­row — MarsEd­it 2.1 is avail­able now — and if you are a Mac users/blogger, I seri­ous­ly give this pro­gram the thumbs-up. Total­ly worth the $30.

Out!

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