All your blogs and entries in one place.

You started with just one blog. Since then, you’ve diversified. You have blogs about your political affiliation, your dog, and your favorite restaurants. You even have a blog about all your other blogs. With all the blogs in your life, it becomes difficult to keep them straight. Each blog is on a different CMS (content management system) and let’s face it, CMSes aren’t known for their user-friendliness. Mariner Software’s MacJournal hopes to bridge the gap between the different blogging platforms, while giving users more control over their posts. The standalone app allows you to post to LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and MobileMe in a native Mac environment.

The paned interface allows newbies and seasoned bloggers to dive right in, offering all the important features you need without going overboard. Individual blogs are called Journals. Similar to iTunes Playlists, you add entries to Journals, and you can drag and drop text, pictures, PDFs, and videos directly into your posts. The Media window contains your media files from the iLife apps, plus any additional folders you’ve designated. Drag and drop is great, but we would have loved to have an “Insert Media” option in the toolbar to quickly add other files.

MacJournal gets around CMSes that don’t allow photo uploads from third-party apps by allowing the user to designate an FTP site, MoblieMe, or Picasa account to upload images to. Once configured, images are automatically uploaded and placed in your posting. The application also includes the ability to record audio and video directly within a post. The audio tools aren’t built for regular podcasting, but for adding the occasional sound bite, they’re a nice addition.

Power-bloggers will no doubt welcome the organization features. There are plenty of options for tagging and annotating posts and tracking the status of work in progress. MacJournal also offers advance scheduling, perfect for daily posters who want to put their blogs on autopilot for a while. Bloggers who like to get their hands dirty mucking about in the HTML code of their posts will be disappointed, however. We were able to make minor adjustments to entire blogs, but serious HTML jockeys should look elsewhere for their code-mashing fix.