MarsEdit, WordPress, Flickr, Skitch and Blog Images
One of the really nice things I like about MarsEdit and WordPress is the ease with which you can put images into your posts. Sure, it's not rocket science, but there's writing the image tag and then there's point-and-click. I like the latter when there's a really nice interface. So I've been doing a little experimenting with the image options with MarsEdit.
There's the images that you upload to WordPress, and that's OK, but it has a limit on the upload of only a few kb. It's not horrible, but when I was trying to put up 20kb images it often times didn't work, and it's probably as much to do with the connectivity as anything else - but this is the connectivity I have, and if it's unreliable, then it really isn't a matter of why as much as it's a question of how to get the images up to the site?
Many months ago I read about Skitch, and watched the demo and thought Hey, this is sweet! and signed up for an invititation. After a few months, I got an invite and have been using it ever since. It's been a simple way to take iSight pictures and screen shots and get them up to a place where they can be saved and served.
Flickr is the same kind of service (so I thought) and so I was recently looking at the different Flickr clients - settling on 1001 as it seemed to be a nice small app that did what I needed and didn't make a big deal of itself. The wrinkle with Flickr was not Flickr - but MarsEdit. When you place an image into a post from Flickr you get a 'mini' version of the image and a link to the Flickr page where the image resides.
This is OK if you're really wanting to forward folks to Flickr, but if you want to just display images in your posts, this isn't the best thing because the way it's integrated in MarsEdit. However, if I put the screenshots up on Skitch then I have to go to the Skitch page to get the URL and then paste it into the post in MarsEdit. It's like I have to do the work up-front or force the readers to do it on their own.
Neither is ideal. So I posted a request to the MarsEdit forums about adding Skitch support. Ideally, I'd be able to put something on Skitch (like I can in Flickr) and then MarsEdit can preview those images and I can include the links easily - but as regular images and not links to pages with images.
Daniel wrote back about the future plans, and if he does the plug-in I think I'm going to have to write a Skitch one as this is just about the neatest little snap-n-share application and service I've ever used. If you haven't seen it, take a look.