MarsEdit: Only Some of my Posts are Downloaded

By default, MarsEdit attempts to download all of the posts (and pages, where pertinent) that are associated with your blog. If you are seeing a smaller number of posts appear in MarsEdit than you expect, here are some troubleshotting steps you can take to solve the problem:

  1. Confirm your blog system supports downloading all posts. Most blogging services, including WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr, support a mechanism whereby MarsEdit can request posts “in chunks,” so that it can systematically request all the posts from your blog by asking for several posts at a time.

    If your blog service uses an older mechanism that doesn’t support this feature, then you will only be able to download a fixed number of blog posts, and selecting a higher number of posts may cause errors on your server when refreshing the blog.

  2. Check the download settings in the “General” tab of MarsEdit’s blog settings. If your blog supports downloading all posts, the settings should show an option to download all, or only some posts. Make sure “all” is selected.
  3. Make sure the user you are authenticating as has access to all the posts on the blog. On some publishing systems such as WordPress, multiple users may contribute posts to the same blog. If your username is not authorized to download and edit posts that were made by another user, then the list of posts retrieved by MarsEdit will omit those posts that you don’t have access to.
  4. If you use WordPress, see if any of the posts on your blog are using a “custom post type” other than “Post” or “Page”. Currently, MarsEdit only supports downloadings posts and pages. Entries with custom types will not be included in the list of posts.
  5. Look for download errors in the Network Log. Select Window > Network Log, clear the log, then click Refresh to download posts again. After all of your posts are downloaded, look near the bottom of the Network Log output for indications that an error has occurred. Try searching the log for “Succeeded: NO” to locate possible issues with your blogging web service.
  6. If no errors are being reported, and the number of posts still doesn’t match your expectations, look for blog service configurations that might affect the total number of posts that are returned. In particular if you are using WordPress, some plugins for managing membership access to posts may inadvertently limit the number of posts that are made accessible by 3rd-party apps such as MarsEdit.

If you are still having trouble, please get in touch and we’ll help you solve the problem.