Wednesday, February 13, 2019

The Future of Blogger and MarsEdit

Daniel Jalkut:

Google is shutting down the Picasa Web Albums API, and MarsEdit will no longer be able to upload images to Blogger/Blogspot blogs.

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This is a very disappointing development, but it sort of comes with the territory for an app such as MarsEdit that supports a variety of services, none of which is under my control. Over the past 12 years, I’ve witnessed the disappearance of services such as Vox and Posterous, and the elimination of support for 3rd party apps by services such as Squarespace.

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

Another example of why one should keep one's own data, instead of trusting the "cloud".

If you never linked your blogger blog to Google+, you weren't able to add images in MarsEdit anyhow. ;^) Flickr support remains strong, however. MarsEdit always impresses.

I do wish MarsEdit would let you insert inline images with src=“data:image/png;base64...” tags... That’d be a win for everyone.

@Ruffin as I mentioned in the comments on my post, the one hesitation I'd have about using data: tags is they force all the images for a post into a single blog (the page source) and doesn't give flexibility to browsers about how/when to load them. It would be a nice hack in some situations but I'm not sure if it would be the best general-purpose solution.

My blog started in 2005 and I never trusted WordPress to hold my many photos. I always put them in a separate folder outside of WordPress from where I can access them in in any post I want. I have a shortcut snippet which only needs the filename and does the rest for me. Until today I am very happy about the decision 15 y ago...

Sort of related to Chris' comment about keeping one's own data: Google encouraged users of its Blogger platform to use Google+ for commenting. Now that G+ is going away, all the comments that people left using G+ also are going away. Years of conversations, gone.

@binky
Yep. Honestly, it might be time for anyone using Blogger to worry about the long term viability of the platform itself. Google is shutting down a lot of ancillary services to Blogger and I can see them deciding to pull the plug altogether.

In a similar vein, I'm still trying to figure out if I can use Hangouts going forward. Even if I can, what happens to Google Voice integration? Guess it's back to using multiple apps when one app used to handle three roles. Oh well.

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