Weblog editors and crashing

One of the benefits of using a desktop weblog editor is crash protection.

Say you’re writing a post in your browser, and your browser crashes. The post is gone.

Say you’re writing in MarsEdit instead. You can save as a draft periodically so you can prevent a crash from losing your post.

But—even more—MarsEdit automatically recovers your post in the event of a crash, even if you didn’t save it as a draft. When you re-launch MarsEdit it will re-open the post or posts you were working on.

We very rarely get crash logs for MarsEdit, but no application is crash-proof, if for no other reason than circumstances outside the control of the application can cause a crash in even the most stable software.

P.S. Ecto may also have this feature. (If it doesn’t have it already, I bet Adriaan will add it.) My point is more that this crash-protection is a feature of desktop weblog editors that browsers don’t have. Usually we talk about the UI and scriptability and all that as benefits of desktop weblog editors—but this one thing, however unromantic, may be the single best reason to use such an app.