MarsEdit is now my Mac blogging platform of choice. Until recently, when I wanted to work on MarsEdit drafts on multiple machines, my workflow consisted of uploading a draft of my post to my blog, and then downloading it to my other machine. With a little bit of tinkering, you can do away with such a workaround, and use Dropbox to automate your workflow.
If you’re a geek, you may have heard about Markdown, a markup language that makes it easy to output HTML, without actually having to know even a lick of HTML. We joined the love fest ourselves recently, covering the basics, as well as looking at a Windows app and a Mac app that support Markdown. With the proliferation of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors today, though, why should you even bother with Markdown?
This week’s app of the week post is a mea culpa of sorts, instead of a full review. Several months ago, we compared MarsEdit, ecto, and Blogo, which are all Mac blogging apps. Head on over to that review for a more detailed look at MarsEdit, and the other two apps. At the time, I favored ecto, largely because of the way that it handled images. Since then, I’ve seen the light. I’ve purchased a MarsEdit license, and haven’t looked back.
Last week, we covered two tools to help you scan your website for malware. Another method to determine if your site has been hacked is to look at changes in your server files themselves. That, though, can be time consuming if you do it manually. If you use WordPress (the self-hosted variety), and you want to use an automated tool that detects changes to files, take File Monitor Plus for a spin.
Yesterday we compared Squarespace and WordPress, and I indicated that as slick as Squarespace was, 40Tech was going to remain on a self-hosted WordPress installation. Bloggers using a self-hosted instance of WordPress, though, need to make sure that their blogs are secure. That includes making sure that your blog isn’t already compromised. How do you do that? The easiest way to do that is to use external tools to scan your site. There are two that we use here at 40Tech, and recommend.
