please let me know so that i don't mess up my upgrade to Lion

strangely enough BlogAssist is not mentioned on RoaringApps website.

Thanks.

I am looking for software that enables me to provide my blog only to paid subscribers. Can BlogAssist do that? If not, could you please recommend software?

I agree, BlogAssist makes it easier/faster for writing blog posts, however, I feel quite limited with the only options for values being value 1 or value 2. What about values 3, 4 and 5 for more complex HTML entries, such as adding height/width and title/alt tags to images (certain browsers don't display one or the other), title and rel tags to links, or adding subjects to email links?

Examples:

It's primarily a feature request that would help blog owners automate and simplify valid HTML/XHTML practices, while giving more advanced users some additional pluggable values for their more complex codes; that's all.

Actually, it has never opened, and I don't know how to use it.

Any suggestions?

I am not an html person; in that case, am I wasting my time with this app?

Thank you,
Matt

I spent the best part of an hour trying to purchase Blog Assist on a Mac Software Spotlight special offer and the server kept hanging!!

Correspondence with Spotlight below:

"Hello,
Sorry, you will need to contact BlogAssist to determine what went wrong there.

"On 2010-09-21, at 12:35 AM, Crispin Balfour wrote:
I spent the best part of an hour trying to purchase Blog Assist, but
could not get onto the site to register and purchase.
Crispin"

All the best,
Frank
Frank Marble
Promotions Manager
Mac Software Spotlight"

Thanks
Crispin

Any chance of having quotes be smart?

Currently I run finished blog posts (made in MarsEdit) through TextSoap for this purpose, an extra step I'd like to do away with.

Hello,

I love the idea of BlogAssist - it fills a need in my daily work for writing simple HTML code. I have two suggestions for updates

1) Content Management Systems - I wondered if BlogAssist could be updated to feature specific CMS code (like the Drupal tag examples in the forum). I would like to be able to have the full complement of Drupal tags as well as HTML tags. I'm sure WordPress users would be interested as well.

2) Add Your Own code - I would love to see the ability to add, save and name the code we use (and even order it within the app). This would provide me with a high level of customization.

Thanks for listening!

Hi,

I currently use the trial version of BlogAssist. This does what i was looking for.

It solves a problem for me:
Almost all apps that have rich text editors which can display links (TextEdit, Caboodle, MacJournal, Together) do only recognize automatically links that begin with the protocol prefix ("http://"). Text that begins with "www." is not automatically turned into a clickable link. All of these apps provide some kind "link to.." dialog to do this, but thats tedious work.

This is how i solve that problem with BlogAssist:
- I modified the default "Web-Link" Operation to this: {value}
- This Operation wraps around any selected text with the proper href html statement.
- When i call the BlogAssist window on a selected text i do not want to overwrite that text with the html statement that BlogAssist creates. I want to overwrite it with the link item in the BlogAssist preview field.
- Therefore i have to right click on that item in the preview field, select "Copy link", click on the "cancel" button to close the BlogAssist window, delete the before selected text (that is now not selected) and finally paste the clipboard content.
- The result is an fully functional link, just as i would define it in the every app specific "Link to.." dialog.

That are far too many single steps for such a often needed task. Therefore BlogAssist offers no advantage to the regular "Link to.." dialog of that apps as it is now.

I would be nice if this could be added:
- Allow the user to choose in the preferences which default action will be executed when the user clicks on the Ok button in the BlogAssist window: "Overwrite selected text with the content of the result field" or "Overwrite selected text with the content of the preview field"
or as an alternative solution:
- Simply replace the Ok button in the BlogAssist window with 2 new buttons: "Paste result" and "Paste preview".
- Allow the user to choose in the preferences what should be done when he clicks on an Operation item in the BlogAssist System Menu: "Copy result of the operation to the clipboard" or "Copy the preview (the clickable link) of the operation to the clipboard" or "Paste the result of the operation to the cursor position of the current active app" or "Paste the preview (the clickable link) of the operation to the cursor positon of the current active app"

Also very handy would be to have BlogAssist menu items in the global context menu (For example Circus Ponies Notebook installs such an item so when i right click on any selected text in any other application i can comfortably "Clip to Notebook...").
- When the user right clicks on any selected text he can choose between these items:
- Show BlogAssist Window
- Execute Operation... pop up menu that shows all operations that are defined in the preferences
- Execute Operation "My Favorite Opp 1" automatically shortcuts (for this the user should be able to "set as favorites" particular operations in an additional column in the Operations preferences)
I would like to have something like this:
1. select a text
2. right clicking it
3. click on the context menu item "BlogAssist-> Replace with a clickable link"
4. Boom its there magic!

Finally the ability to define global key shortcuts in order to execute a particular operation defined in the preferences automatically (without the BlogAssist window) and to toggle "show/hide floating BlogAssist window" would be nice.

Not having the possibility to replace the selected text with the item in the preview field with a button click is a deal breaker for me (global context menus and key shortcuts are nice to have but no that important). Implement this and i buy BlogAssist instantly.

This added BlogAssist features would be an acceptable workaround for the currently missing auto link recognition of the great dejal app Caboodle (for which i own a license).

Thanks

Hi there,

Is there any way to customize the keyboard shortcuts for BlogAssist? I have a few apps that use the Shift-Command-Comma assignment that BlogAssist has for bringing up the panel.

Thanks,

JB

The preference to not launch at startup cannot be changed. I turn it off, and quit the program and it is enabled upon re-launch. Yes, I've trashed plist several times. I do not want BlogAssist to automatically launch.

I am experiencing Mail freezing when I start my system with BlogAssist auto-starting at boot/log-in. I am using Leopard 10.5.5 and Mail version 3.5. As soon as BlogAssist does not load at system start, the problem goes away.

When I use the Paragraph tag, it creates a new paragraph after every comma. Help! I've tried in both plain text files and Word, with the same result.

Thanks.

How do I use value 1 and value 2 in creating a web link?

When I copy text to the clipboard and paste it, I get the same result for both values. Obviously, I want to have the first value be the URL and the second value the link name. I can't seem to do this in the Blog Assist window either. Can't paste to value boxes.

Two suggestions for the next version.

(i) Let the user choose the font and size for the menu. It doesn't have to be as fancy as ClawMenu, but a smaller font, and something other than Lucida Grande, would make the menu easier to use. Actually a tearoff palette would be nice in some applications.

(ii) Tag sets: make it possible to save different sets of operations. The main attraction for me in using BlogAssist is that I have several sites, and several HTML/CSS vocabularies, to deal with. I don't want them all in one huge list; rather it would be much better to have one list per site or per context (Typepad, Livejournal, Drupal, etc.). For writing XML to be fed into InDesign, say, this is crucial.

There is no program now that has both "operations" (that allow boilerplate to be wrapped around a user-supplied string or strings) and multiple sets of operations. Typeit4Me has multiple sets but no operations (in Blogassist's sense); Marsedit and Tag have operations but not multiple sets; Smultron has "collections" but those are limited to Smultron itself.

How do you make a list of items and turn them into an unordered list? I thought I could make a list of items, each on a single line, then copy to the clipboard and highlight all rows and choose Unordered List. But this gives me a list with a single Line Item with all my items together, vs. separate list-item tags.

Can BlogAssist do something to each line of the clipboard?

It would be useful for creating lists, paragraphing text, and other things. Ideally, being able to specify a string to put before the list, one for after the list, plus before and after each item...

r

[lee webb wrote:]

Hi,

I've been using blog assist 1.1.2 for some time now. Is the upgrade to the current version free or discounted in any way?

Thanks

The separators don't work properly. If I create one, then move it up to the place I want and release the mouse button, another exisiting separator disappears - meaning I can't ever make a new one!