Moo! The Musings of a Plaid Cow

Now that it is up to version 3.0, I thought I might give [MarsEdit](http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/) another try. The goal is less to know if the application is any good, but more to figure out if I can adjust my workflow to fit it. (Some would argue that based on the lack of posts, there is a lack of work flowing. I tend to agree. Hopefully this can remove some of the friction and let me be more prolific.)

The first thing I noticed was that the tags were not auto completing, so I searched and found there is no way to automatically download all of the tags. So in the interest of wasting time, I figured out how to do it.

1. Export the content from your [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org/) blog to an XML file on your desktop.

2. About 50 lines in, notice that there a bunch of `` lines. Copy all of these lines to a new text file.

3. Using a power editor of your choice (I use [TextMate](http://macromates.com)), remove the first part of every line (up though the second greater than symbol), then replace everything from the less than symbol to the end of the line with a comma.

4. Now that you have a list of your tags (one per line, with each line ending in a comma), select them all and then paste them into MarsEdit’s tags field for a new post.

5. Save the post as a draft (to make sure it caught up with everything you just pasted), then select all and delete.

6. Your tags should now auto-complete for you.

Note: I am sure that there is some sort of limit in the number of tags that MarsEdit supports–I just don’t have any idea of what it is, other than it is over the 282 tags that I pasted in at once.

Also Note: There is nothing specific about this (except how to get the list of tags) that would limit this to working just with WordPress.

And if this works well for you, please let me know.