BlogAssist is a handy tool to help weblog and website editing by making HTML markup easier.
There are three easy ways to use it: you can use whichever one you prefer, or all three as desired.
THE SYSTEM MENU:
BlogAssist adds a small menu to the right-hand side of the menubar in all applications. You can simply select and copy some text into the clipboard, choose a suitable operation from the menu, then paste the result in the desired location. The text will have been transformed like magic. For example, copying "hey" and choosing Bold will result in "hey" - the HTML tags for boldface text, wrapped around the original text.
THE SERVICES MENU:
BlogAssist also appears in the Services menu, available in most applications. This is really easy to use: just select some text and hit Cmd-< to display a small panel. Simply choose an operation and click OK to drop the marked up text back into your document. The previously copied text also appears in the panel; useful for operations like Web Link that use two values. Copy a URL, select text to use as the link label, hit Cmd-< and choose the operation, then click OK, and you have a web link nicely formatted and inserted.
THE FLOATING WINDOW:
This is similar to the Services menu panel, but can be left open as long as you like. It floats above all other windows, always available. It can be hidden and shown via the BlogAssist system menu. With the floating window displayed, you simply drag text to one or both of its Value fields, choose an operation from the included pop-up menu, then drag the formatted HTML from the Result field. Like the Services panel, this window includes a convenient preview of how the HTML will be rendered in a web page.
BlogAssist comes with several useful operations, including web and e-mail links, bold/italics/strikethrough/etc, LiveJournal tags, and more. But you arent limited to those — you can add, change, or remove them via the Operations Preferences.
Starting with version 2.4, BlogAssist can also automatically substitute HTML entities for accented or special characters, remove your domain from URLs (to use local paths), or other substitutions. See the Substitutions Preferences for details.
