Best Blog App For Mac

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By some metrics, WordPress powers just over 25% of the world’s websites.

That’s not too terribly surprising; WordPress is a flexible content management system (CMS) that can power anything from a blog to a company website, including those with e-commerce components.

In fact, this very website runs on WordPress, as does my own blog. I’ve used it for years to manage these projects, websites for freelance clients, and more.

Over the years, WordPress’ backend has become much easier to use. I can log in to my website from any browser in the world to publish new articles, add content to pages, and upload media to share.

However, I’m a Mac user through and through. I spend most of my workday in front of a 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, and would rather use a rich, native macOS app than a web app any day of the week.

Thankfully, there are several WordPress clients for the Mac. These apps allow me to write and publish articles directly from macOS without the need to fire up a browser. These applications won’t surface things like WordPress’ widget or menu settings, but should make publishing new content as frictionless as possible.

Wait. There’s a Bonus….

Custom Productivity Templates

We have a set of custom productivity templates that work well with the iPad app, GoodNotes. And if you want to try them out, we’ve put together a free guide that can help you.

Best Blog App For Mac

We’ll show you…

  • How to create and save custom page templates in GoodNotes.
  • How to use those page templates to transform GoodNotes into your own productivity notebook (or any other type of notebook replacement).

Plus, we also have included a couple of our custom productivity templates for you to get started with. These templates are right out of our popular productivity course.

The custom templates and the guide are available for FREE to our email subscriber community. And you can get it right now. By joining the Sweet Setup community you’ll also get access to our other guides, early previews to big new reviews and workflow articles we are working on, weekly roundups of our best content, and more.

Things to Consider

In looking at which WordPress client is the best, there are several criteria to review:

  • Design – A good WordPress client for the Mac should be a good Mac app. It should be fast, stable, and conform to system norms found in other macOS applications.
  • Flexibility – WordPress can be configured in a bunch of different ways, and a WordPress client should be able to adapt to different installations easily.
  • Price – I’m not super concerned with price for this review. I’m willing to pay for an application I will use numerous times a day. In fact, I’d rather pay for something I depend on than have it disappear or fall out of date because the developer can’t afford to keep it going.

A Quick Sidebar

The universe of WordPress can be broken into two main worlds:

  • WordPress.org: This is the free, open-source software that you can install on your own server. It’s often referred to as “self-hosted” WordPress, and it’s what The Sweet Setup and many other independent websites use.
  • WordPress.com: This is what is called “hosted” WordPress. This is more akin to something like Squarespace or Tumblr, where your website and all of its content are hosted by the company that made the platform. While the self-hosted WordPress software is free, a WordPress.com website can be as much as $25/month.

Different WordPress clients treat these two worlds differently, and that will be noted throughout the rest of the review.

Our pick: MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a name that has been around the Mac world for a long time. Originally part of NetNewsWire, the application has been part of Red Sweater Software for many years.

MarsEdit supports numerous blogging platforms beyond WordPress, including Blogger and Movable Type. We’ll be focusing on the first, but its ability to work with different content management systems is impressive.

Setup

Getting started with MarsEdit and WordPress is simple. At first launch, the application will prompt you to log in with your blog’s credentials.

For WordPress, this is the same user name and password you use to log in to your website on the web. (You will be asked to provide the URL of your website, too.) This login information is stored securely in your Mac’s keychain, and is never synced to another device or server.

If you don’t yet have a WordPress site, MarsEdit can direct you to setting up a WordPress.com account.

Once logged in, you will be presented with a list of your most recent blog posts:

If this looks familiar, it should. MarsEdit’s user interface isn’t all that unlike macOS’ built-in Mail application. That’s a plus in our book.

Creating a New Post

Posting a new blog post in MarsEdit is as simple as composing an email.

Clicking New Post from the app’s toolbar will bring up the post editor:

Note: MarsEdit allows for rich text editing, like Mail. If you use bold text in the editor, the text will be bold on your website and so on. However, the application will also take HTML text if you prefer to write in HTML or Markdown, as I do. When you start your first new post, you will be asked which the program should use.

In the main section of the window, you’ll enter the post’s headline, any tags you wish to use, and then of course, the content.

You can write directly within MarsEdit, or paste content in from an external editor, such as Byword.

Down the right side of the window, you’ll see your blog’s categories. These are fetched from your website, and if you opt to create a new category within MarsEdit, it will be added to your blog automatically.

Under the category list, you can set several other parameters for your post:

  • Featured Image: If your blog’s theme supports it, you can add this image here directly via drag-and-drop
  • Post status: Draft, Private, Published
  • Author: Select a writer for your post, if your site supports multiple authors
  • Comments: None, Open or Closed. If you have comments visible on your blog, it’s important to select the correct option.
  • TrackBacks: This notifies other WordPress sites that you have linked to them within your post.

Once you have your content in, you can preview the post by clicking the Preview toolbar item.

To add a photo to a post, click Media in the toolbar, and MarsEdit’s Media Manager will open. Here, you can select images from your Mac’s hard drive to upload with your new post:

Once your desired image is selected, you can tell MarsEdit how to style it (left-align, right-align, etc), and you can change the file name and Alt. Text as desired.

Additionally, you can set the size of the image. You can set the width, and the height will be automatically set. If you select Treat as Retina image, MarsEdit will halve the size of the image, as explained in this support document:

If you want a 400×400 image on your blog to look nice on Retina displays, just supply an image at least 800×800 and check the Treat as Retina image checkbox. MarsEdit will produce the expected HTML and upload the image at twice the width and height.

Very clever.

Once everything is just right, publishing to your WordPress site is as simple as pressing Send to Blog. Alternatively, a post can be saved as a local draft for completion later.

Editing an Existing Post

Editing an existing post is also simple.

Clicking on a post will preview it in the main window; double-clicking will open it in its own window.

Once the editor opens, you can change any text and hit Send to Blog for your changes to be applied to the web.

Advanced Options

Out of the box, MarsEdit will work nicely with most WordPress installations, but if you’ve customized your blog, the program can be adapted to just about anything.

To see your blog’s settings, right-click on its name in the main window, and a new pop-up will open.

I won’t walk through all of the possible setting here, but I think a few are worth mentioning:

The latest version of MarsEdit includes an automatic Dark Mode that follows the macOS preference. It’s subtle, but we like that MarsEdit matches the rest of our windows in Dark Mode now.

In the Editing tab, I’ve told MarsEdit to use Markdown when rendering the post preview. Since I write and publish in Markdown, this assures me that I haven’t missed an asterisk or a line break somewhere.

For a while, I was publishing posts, having forgotten to set a category. In the Posting tab, I’ve now told MarsEdit to warn me if I try to post without a category selected.

Best Blog App For Mac Free

On 512 Pixels, I use a custom field to link to an external source from my post’s headline. This post is a good example:

To make this work, I have a custom WordPress plugin that looks for a URL in the “linked_list_url” field. This is just a little bit of metadata, and MarsEdit can let me add it directly from its new post interface.

Pricing

MarsEdit can be purchased from the Mac App Store for $49.95. The developer also sells the application directly on the web and offers a free 30-day trial. It requires macOS Sierra or later.

The Runners-Up

While MarsEdit has been around a long time, it is not the only WordPress client for the Mac.

Blogo

Blogo offers not only a free Mac app, but an iOS app as well. A monthly subscription of $6.99 unlocks several pro features:

  • Support for multiple blogs
  • Media search
  • Ability to reply to comments from the app
  • Syncing drafts with Evernote
  • Support for custom fields
  • Audience Booster, which will copy your content to Medium

Blogo is laid out well with posts and pages in a single, filterable column, a main content window, and then publishing settings:

As it has an iOS app, it’s easy to think about Blogo as an entire blogging system above or around WordPress. As polished as the user interface is, I find its lack of fine-grained settings frustrating. MarsEdit’s settings panel may be overwhelming to some, but if you’re publishing to a blog, those options are important.

Desk

Desk can be used with self-hosted WordPress accounts as long as you also have a free WordPress.com account set up and associated with it. If you use the popular plugin Jetpack installed, you’re already good to go.

While the app’s interface is certainly more modern looking than MarsEdit’s, I find it to be much more confusing.

Instead of taking a Mail-like approach, Desk wants to create a separate document for each individual post.

Once a new document has been created, it is added to the main timeline, along with other published posts:

(I’d much prefer my drafts and published articles be separated.)

To publish a new post, click the export arrow in the upper-right corner. A new panel slides in, offering several posting options. Unlike MarsEdit, Desk doesn’t offer much in the way of customization here, and lacks support for advanced features like custom fields.

I should note that I had Desk crash repeatedly on my iMac, which was running the most up-to-date version of macOS Sierra.

Desk can be picked up in the Mac App Store for $19.99. If you want something simple, it does look nice, but it’s not for me.

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WordPress for Mac

WordPress offers a first-party application. It’s a free download from their website, and is basically a wrapper around the WordPress.com website. If you’re using that option, you’ll be all set, as the Mac app offers almost everything present in the online back-end.

If you have connected your self-hosted WordPress site to the company’s service, then you’ll be able to access your site here as well.

If your WordPress site is close to stock, this is a nice way to publish and edit posts and pages, see site traffic, manage users and plugins, and more.

If you rely on more advanced options like custom fields, this app isn’t really an option.

In Closing

If you’re like me and would rather use a desktop application than a web app to manage your WordPress site, MarsEdit is the best route. It’s full of features, easy to use, and feels right at home on macOS.

Wait. There’s a Bonus….

Custom Productivity Templates

We have a set of custom productivity templates that work well with the iPad app, GoodNotes. And if you want to try them out, we’ve put together a free guide that can help you.

We’ll show you…

  • How to create and save custom page templates in GoodNotes.
  • How to use those page templates to transform GoodNotes into your own productivity notebook (or any other type of notebook replacement).

Plus, we also have included a couple of our custom productivity templates for you to get started with. These templates are right out of our popular productivity course.

The custom templates and the guide are available for FREE to our email subscriber community. And you can get it right now. By joining the Sweet Setup community you’ll also get access to our other guides, early previews to big new reviews and workflow articles we are working on, weekly roundups of our best content, and more.

Most bloggers today are familiar only with services designed for use with their choice of web browser. If you edit a WordPress.com account or WordPress.org installation, chances are you login and publish your material through the cloudware provided.

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The same goes for Blogger and TypePad users, and as well as options like MySpace and Vox. But if you’ve grown tired of those standard frontends, and would prefer to utilize software to blog for work or for personal enjoyment, there are alternatives that you should know about. For Mac users in particular, there are several that prove as useful, powerful, and visually worthwhile as any comparative webware.

Here we present our best discoveries. Share your suggestions in the comments, too!

Flock

People conditioned to regard their Web browser as their de facto “blogware” will likely warm to Flock fairly quickly. You might say that’s because Flock is a browser as well. Its foundation is the Mozilla platform. The joy in using Flock and all that it grants easy access to is that it's built for the social web. You can network and share photos and cool web pages with little effort. And, yes, you can blog, all while navigating the web just as you ordinarily would.

MarsEdit

One of the most celebrated of publishing utilities for Mac OS X users, MarsEdit, now in version 2.2.2, is not a free package. Its cost is $29.95 after a free 30-day trial. But a common refrain heard by users is that the more often it is employed the more the price is so clearly justified.

Apart from dead simple uploads and a quickly-learned interface, MarsEdit sports features like compatibility with Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Vox, and more, a Flickr connection, and integration with more hardcore Mac-specific text editors like BBEdit and TextMate. In short, it’s a power tool.

ecto

Another multi-service editor of MarsEdit-like design, ecto puts considerable emphasis on getting you from A to B to Z as quickly as possible. It certainly holds its own by comparison with others on the market. Its list of supported blog services is extensive, to say the least. Presently in Version 3 form, ecto has been around for over 5 years, and costs $17.95 to own.

Blogo

Launched by Brainjuice, Blogo seems simply drawn and puts your typical blogware to shame. As with the other editors above, its support list for blogging services is long, allows you to quickly publish media, and can even manage to publish Twitter and Ping.fm messages in association with your blog feed - call it streamlined PR, if you will.

Finally, Blogo gives users the option to produce content distraction-free with an on-board full screen mode. That’s a nice little dollop of GTD whipped cream, for sure.

Tumblr Dashboard Widget

Here’s a super small and super lightweight Dashboard application tossed midstream into the mix. We think Tumblr Dashboard Widget is worth mentioning simply for the fact that Tumblr itself is a bare boned and ultra-minimalist invention. A widget of this size is a fine complement. Enough said.

Mac Journal

An appreciable application both for its adherence to the traditional idea of journaling as well as its implementation of color to make the editing environment that much more colorful, Mac Journal is something that, while quite costly at $34.95 for a license, runs with the best in the business. It may not carry the same fanboy cache as that held by MarsEdit and others, but it's a strong delivery nonetheless.

Blog.Mac

Best Apps For Mac

Intended to be a generally fool-proof development, Blog.Mac is more or less the closest thing to something that would come out of Apple’s own software assembly room. It’s not heavy on the details. It’s personal blogging made simple.

The current release, Version 1.3 Beta 4, talks to Apple’s MobileMe web hosting service and offers better Mac OS X Leopard integration. It will set users back $29.99. The creators at Largemouth Software also offer a Blog.Mac template editor free of charge.

Best Blog App For Mac Windows 10

iWeb plus MobileMe

Best blog writing app mac

You could go with something independently-made like Blog.Mac, but if you prefer something actually from the halls of Infinite Loop, Apple presents its own website and webpage editor in the form of iWeb. It’s a very controlled setup, and comes with all Mac computers sold today (standalone iLife suite runs $79), and to make use of it in ways that takes advantage of the “Apple experience,” you’ll need to pony up $99 per year for MobileMe hosting (formerly '.Mac') and photo gallery access and so forth.

RapidWeaver

Some people just want to blog in their own unique way, requiring a departure from many popular web services today. RapidWeaver lets users wield an editor’s stick in ways that no other application here is able. Of course, that can mean a concerted effort to continue a blog for a significant period of time within the environment provided by RapidWeaver and the folks at RealMac Software, but hey, if you want choices, you’ve got choices with this one. Nearly limitless options, really.

Fluid

Okay, so you’ve parsed the choices listed above, and you’re not quite sold on any of them. Perhaps you recognize more than ever your liking for the way your blog service of choice operates, but you'd rather have it resemble an application within your Dock or menu bar. Fluid lets you do just that. It behaves as a kind of super powerful webclip creator that allows you to access web applications without having to visit the URL in Firefox or Camino or whathaveyou. There’s a bit of a wow factor that goes with this download.

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