Using Tags with MarsEdit
Posted on September 24th, 2008 by Neil Crosby. Filed under Blog Posts.
Since I do most of my blog writing on the train I don’t write my posts straight into the editor in my browser (it would be pretty stupid to do that anyway, but that’s not the point). Instead, I use MarsEdit – an offline editor with support for WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, LiveJournal etc.
Stupidly, up until yesterday I had absolutely no idea that it had tag support. I like to tag my posts with as much useful information as possible, but because I hadn’t been able to obviously do this from within MarsEdit I’d ended up having to do it after uploading my posts to the server. Not ideal, and it meant I spent less time doing it.
So, how to enable tags support in MarsEdit? Simple; whilst editing a post, go to the “View” menu and select the “Tags Field” option. You’ll end up with an extra field above any blog entries you write where you can enter tags.
It’s worth nothing that MarsEdit’s tag implementation is comma separated. I come from a space separated with quotation marks to conjoin words background, so I’ve found myself creating huge long tags where I’ve not meant to a few more times than I’d like so far. It would be nice if there was the option to switch between comma and space separation of tags, but I can’t have everything, can I?
Apparently, I can’t even have a pony. Boo.
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I wrestled with the question of commas vs. spaces. In the end I decided to go with what the UI provides naturally. That “capsule” interface is a standard on OS X (e.g. in Mail), and I thought it would be best to have it behave the way other instances of it behave on the OS.
I am still considering the possibility of somehow offering a preference in the future to switch between commas and spaces.
Daniel
Hi Daniel.
Absolutely, if the UI provides commas as the natural interface it makes total sense to go with that as the initial implementation of the app. To be honest, this is the first time I’ve used an app (other than the Flickr Uploader, which does things its own way) on OSX which handles tags, so I wasn’t aware of an OS level standard.
That said, if it was possible to add a preference to swap between spaces and commas as the separator I’d be ridiculously grateful.