It’s been a good day for pathetic emails:

For some time I’ve been wanting to move my blogging efforts over a desktop app, to be able to control multiple blogs from one place, and to search through and manage the content more easily.

The 2 main contenders that I could find for the Mac platform were Ecto and MarsEdit.  The latter seems to be considerably more actively maintained, has a slicker interface and was available for download on the Mac AppStore so I went with that.

The main feature I was missing in MarsEdit was the fairly comprehensive tag handling offered by WordPress.  The fact you can type only a few letters of the tag you need and it auto-completes is something you can’t do without once you get used to it.  The Delicious website and similar desktop tools all offer this functionality.

The first challenge was to get my data out of Delicious, not the links/bookmarks that are offered as their only export option but the actual tags.  Not surprisingly there’s a WP plugin for that, enter EG-Delicious Tags.

Once your tags are copied over to your WP installation you can access the data as a serialized array from the WP database, it’s in the options table under the key _transient_egdel_tags.

Then the data needs to be integrated with MarsEdit.  The app’s author, Daniel Jalkut, kindly explained which plist file within the app needs to be updated to enable the search auto-completion feature.

A simple PHP script was sufficient to deserialize the data and wrap it in XML tags:

<?php
$data = <<<DATA
a:773:{s:7:”_blogit”; …
DATA;
$struct = (unserialize($data));
$keys = array_keys($struct);
$out = ”;
$out .=”\n”;
foreach ($keys as $tag) { $out .=”<string>$tag</string>\n”;}
print $out;
?>

Add the XML to the relevant key and save out the DataSources.plist file and you’re done.

Here is some great advice from the SEOmoz site and their Trifecta tool:

Resources for Improving Blog Posts

• How to Write Great Blog Content – from ProBlogger
• 7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links & Traffic – from ProBlogger
• 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post with a Bang – from Copyblogger
• The Day You Became a Better Writer – from Scott Adams
• Blogging in an Oversaturated Market is Usually a Poor Decision – from SEOmoz

Resources for Bringing Search Traffic to a Blog

• The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – from Aaron Wall
• Wordpress SEO: The Definitive Guide to High Rankings for Your Blog – from Joost De Valk
• How to Deal with Pagination & Duplicate Content – from SEOmoz

Resources for Growing a Blog’s Popularity

• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic – from SEOmoz
• Blogging Tips for Beginners – from ProBlogger
• The Art of Linkbaiting – from Performancing