This is a test post—you can safely skip it (unless you’re interested in getting the “preview” viewer in MarsEdit to mimic the look and feel of your WordPress 2.x blog). After registering my copy of MarsEdit, I decided to post a note on the support forum:
I wrote an email (not in the forum) earlier asking for the ability to send a MarsEdit-generated post to my WordPress blog as a draft. The reason is simple:
when I write the post in MarsEdit and preview it, it looks one way…when I send it to my WP 2.2.2 blog, it looks different. I’m not ready for it to be made public until it looks the way I want it to look. Now I have to post the entry live, then jump on the server and reset it to draft until I clean up the way it looks. Not a great workflow.
So my question: is there any documentation on how you take a WP theme and use info in there to tweak the template of the ME 2 preview window? Maybe that would get the 2 in better visual sync.
In no time at all Daniel Jalkut (author of MarsEdit) responded:
Hello again Wally! I keep meaning to:
1. Write a blog tutorial about how to make a picture-perfect preview with MarsEdit.
2. Improve the preview support in MarsEdit so it’s even easier to do it.
But the gist of it is this… go to the “full page” view of one of your posts, like:http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=372
Now take the source for that entire page, and copy/paste it into the custom template in MarsEdit.
Now you’ll have to fix some links probably, to turn CSS links for instance into full URLs to your site. Actually, yours looks pretty good already (I just pasted it).
So now … you just whittle away. Select all the “post content” in the template and delete it. Replace it with the #body# tag. In your case, this starts with A year or so …
Get the gist? It’s kind of tedious, but in a few minutes, look what I’ve got in MarsEdit:
http://www.red-sweater.com/snips/Template-20070906-105919.png
Hope this helps.
Also make sure the font settings in Preferences -> Preview match the browser you generally use to examine your posts. That will make it exactly match.
Took me a few minutes to implement his suggestions but it works. Works well.
As a final test, let me drop a Flickr image in and see how that formats (that was a real problem before I fixed my preview template)…
On the east side of the Hudson river, just across from Catskill, NY, you find Olana (home of Frederic Church). I spent an afternoon here this summer and recommend a visit—after you visit Hyde Park (FDR’s Springwood and the old Vanderbilt mansion next door).
So the new MarsEdit template is working well. I still have a few layout anomalies but since they’re the same on both the ME2 preview pane and what I see with a browser when viewing the blog, I guess my problems are in the WordPress theme (which means more css school for me).
Note: since writing me earlier today, Daniel updated the Red Sweater blog with an entry on customizing the preview function.
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/393/perfect-preview-with-marsedit