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I’ve long had a problem with the search fields that are omnipresent in the toolbars of so many Mac OS X applications. My problem? I wanted to quickly jump up to them so I could enter text directly, but I wanted to do so with a keyboard shortcut.

This is particularly true in Safari and Keychain Access, two applications where I frequently want to use the toolbar search field.

It turns out that I was too lazy to look for it, and the option is labeled in a misleading way. I’ll admit, I just plain missed the keyboard shortcut.

The command can be labeled as “Find” where I’ve seen it. It may vary and carry some additional text, as in Safari where it is “Google Search” and MarsEdit where the label is “Search Weblogs,” both of which make sense when the resulting action is to jump to the search field. In both of these applications, the command is in a submenu under Edit > Find.

In Keychain Access, it’s just “Find” — so it doesn’t even match the label on the “Search” field it sends cursor focus to.

The keyboard shortcut is Option-Command-F, and appears as ⌥⌘F.

It’s sad when you can’t find the “Find” command, isn’t it? Grin.

Now that I’ve upgraded to Drupal 5.10, I’ve discovered I can no longer post from MarsEdit. I get this error upon submitting a post via XML-RPC, via Drupal’s core Blog API module:

You either tried to edit somebody else’s blog or you don’t have permission to edit your own blog.

Annoying things like this happen all too often with Drupal. I’ve had enough problems with the core BlogAPI and (practically required) Pathauto modules that I should really consider whether the Drupal platform is worth it. It feels like updates for modules are never really tested before they are put out, and so problems like this slip through.

I haven’t figured out what the problem is yet, but hopefully I’ll get this fixed soon. I hate posting through Web interfaces if I can avoid it.

And, just to be clear, all I did was update to the current Drupal 5.10 via my normal routine. I kept my “settings.php” file and my “files” and “sites/all/modules” directories, but everything else is from Drupal 5.10. I ran the “update.php” script after the upgrade. No settings were changed in MarsEdit, which worked before the upgrade.

Update 9/20: I looked in the “Access control” page of my sites’ Drupal Administration section. The “administer content with blog api” had been turned off for my user role. I re-enabled it tentatively, and now posts from MarsEdit appear to work again. I’m not sure why the “administer content with blog api” permission would have been disabled in the Drupal 5.10 update, but that’s what appeared to happen to me.

I do need to submit this as a bug report or support request, but I’m noticing all the hits I’m getting for talking about MarsEdit and Drupal … so I’m just going to mention this here, first. I’m getting lockups in MarsEdit — both the last Newsgator edition and the new version just released by Red Sweater Software — when I select the last category item in the drawer for a blog post.

Initially, I get a spinning beach ball cursor. Then, MarsEdit stops responding to many kinds of input. I can still bring the application to the front, and for a few moments, I may be able to bring the “MarsEdit” window to the foreground, but eventually, all I can do is drag that window. The blog post editing window I was working on disappears; I can’t even see it when using Exposé’s all-window mode.

If I attempt to quit MarsEdit — which I have to do from its Dock icon — I do get prompted to save the new/modified post. However, the Save sheet drops down from an invisible window, which is very odd. If I click the mouse cursor in the screen area around that sheet, I do get to see the window. I can click in the buttons in the dialog sheet but nothing happens.

After a Force Quit, I have been prompted that an auto-save version of the post is available. I can resume from that point.

This lockup happens for me specifically in my Drupal stories blog in MarsEdit (which is configured as a Movable Type API blog). I have quite a few categories (30ish?) listed there from my Drupal taxonomy. I haven’t tried adding a term that is alphabetically later than the current one, to see if it’s something about the category/term, or the position, or what.

For what it’s worth, some of those taxonomy terms are duplicated in the list in MarsEdit.

I wonder if anyone else is seeing this kind of behavior.

Well, after reading Walkah’s 2004 post about using Drupal’s Blog API module with MarsEdit, I was inspired to try again. The inability to get MarsEdit working with my Drupal 4.7.4 install has made an impact in my blogging style.

This post is another attempt. As recommended, I’ve switched over to the Movable Type API rather than MarEdit’s “Drupal” setting. When the site was reloaded in MarsEdit, I was able to see more data, such as the taxonomy categories, in the listing of posts.

However, in writing this post, I notice that I’m unable to set a category. The “Categories” list that slides out in a per-post drawer in MarsEdit is blank.

Oh well, I’ll still post this and see what happens. I want to see if I can now round-trip posts: create a new post, save it to the site, and then edit/update it in MarsEdit. With the MarsEdit “Drupal” setting, I was unable to do that effectively.

Update: It looks like it worked, and meets my expectations if you discount the missing categories!

Later update: Categories cannot be set with the MarsEdit “Keywords” tab. I also found that human-friendly URLs are not set via the Pathauto module on the stories I post through MarsEdit.

Even later update: Since the intertwingularity of Drupal and MarsEdit has changed over time for me (and as I update this post on Drupal 6.6 and MarsEdit 2.2.2, it works so well I barely create posts any other way) and this is a popular post, I wanted to let you know that you can find all — or most, since not all have been tagged — of my Drupal+MarsEdit posts in one list.

I’m having a harder time posting to the new Drupal site. I can’t reliably use MarsEdit, my desktop posting tool, to post here.

I don’t know if I have the posting APIs set up incorrectly or there’s a mistake in my MarsEdit setup. It’s definitely more complicated to set up the various XML-RPC APIs on Drupal and for Drupal in MarsEdit than these same tasks were in Userland Manila.