Blogging tools for the Mac

I'm relatively new to the art of blogging (although I've been writing for a number of years), and as a result I'm not all that familiar with different blogging set-ups and tools. When I decided to set up my first blog, ALLYGILL.CO.UK which is aligned to my business, some of the choices were really made for me. I had built the web site for my Process Management consultancy business using RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is great because it allows me some considerable flexibility without getting me dragged into the gory details of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, etc. on a daily basis. The pages are static, and I probably update them once or twice a month. Dreamweaver was too expensive and overkill for my fairly conservative requirements.

RapidWeaver also supports third party add-ons, and has a thriving developer community. One such add-on was RapidBlog which I purchased with a view to incorporating a blog in the future. RapidBlog is designed to work closely with Blogger, so the choice of a blog host was made automatically.

Blogger itself is a perfectly adequate tool for creating and managing blog entries, as is RapidBlog, but I wanted something with a bit more flexibility and more importantly, that didn't rely on an on-line connection as I quite often write on trains, planes and automobiles (I'm not a driver so don't panic). Some automatic content and configuration management was also important, which, for me, ruled out using RapidBlog as it would overcomplicate the way I manage my web site content.

I don't really remember how I came across MarsEdit. I imagine I read a review in one of the many Mac comics that I subscribe to and it struck me as being a fairly simple tool to use but one that ticked all the right boxes. It's also inexpensive which always goes down well at the Apple Harvest. I would have pointed out an excellent review I read the other day, but I can't quite put my hands on it at the moment. It was written by a staff writer for one of the UK specialist Mac magazines and is much better than anything I can throw together. I'll post a link if I can find it at a later date. Although MarsEdit provides some HTML formatting support, it is a bit basic and I recently added BlogAssist to the arsenal. This is another simple tool allowing that little bit of extra control over blog entry appearance.

Let me know if there's other stuff I'm not aware of. I have looked at WordPress and I'm aware that there's a wide range of associated development tools, but I'm committed to Blogger at the moment. This combination of tools serves me perfectly well and as a wise man said:

"If it ain't bust, don't fix it!"