In January, 2020, MarsEdit dropped official support for the Blogger.com publishing platform. One of the reasons for dropping support is a change in Google policy that makes it impossible to create new authorizations to Blogger with MarsEdit.

Existing MarsEdit customers who have a functioning connection to Blogger may be able to migrate the authentication information from that Mac to another Mac by following these steps. This solution is offered as a stop-gap opportunity to keep MarsEdit working in the short term while you evaluate options for migrating your blog to a system that supports MarsEdit.

Here are the step-by-step instructions. When you see “old Mac” it means the Mac on which you have a working Blogger connection. When you see “new Mac” it means the Mac on which you wish to establish a working connection:

Important: These steps involve directly manipulating the contents of your Keychain. You may want to back up the contents of your Keychain before proceeding. If you are not comfortable with these steps, do not continue. While we believe these steps are safe, we take no responsibility for damage to your keychain that may occur as a result of your taking them.

The Easy Way (If it Works)

Keychain Access is an application, in the Utilities folder of your Mac, that provides access to the secure contents of your Mac’s keychain, where many passwords and authorizations are stored. It supports exporting and importing items, in theory. In practice, we have found that in recent versions the “File” -> “Export” menu item is often greyed out regardless of what is selected. Nonetheless, if you can get this to work, it’s a bit easier:

1. Open Applications -> Utilities -> Keychain Access
2. Search for MarsEdit, and select the item(s) that contain blogger.com in the name<./li>
3. Select File -> Export to create a file-based copy of the items.
4. Copy the export file securely to your new Mac.
5. Open Keychain Access on the new Mac.
6. Select File -> Import and select the file containing the exported items.

The Harder Way

If Keychain Access doesn’t do the trick, you’ll have to use command line tools in the Terminal application to directly dump the contents of your MarsEdit authentication entry, and then directly import the contents to the keychain on your new Mac. Note: where you are asked to replace a placeholder value like <Google Login>, you should replace the whole placeholder including the less-than and greater-than signs.

1. Determine the Google Login used for your blog. It’s often the same as your gmail email address. You’ll use this in the following steps. Wherever you see <Google Login> below, replace that with the literal value of your personal login ID.
2. Determine the API Endpoint URL value for your blog. You can find this setting in MarsEdit’s blog settings. You’ll use this in the following steps. Wherever you see <API Endpoint URL> below, replace that with the literal value from your blog settings.
3. Open Applications -> Terminal on your old Mac and run the following command:

   security find-generic-password -w -s "MarsEdit Authentication: <API Endpoint URL>" > ~/Desktop/BloggerAuth.txt

   This will create a text file on your Mac’s Desktop containing the MarsEdit authentication information. Important: this data is unencrypted and you should treat this file as you would treat any file containing the password to your blog.

4. Securely copy the BloggerAuth.txt file to your new Mac’s Desktop.
5. Open Applications -> Terminal on your new Mac and run the following command:

   security add-generic-password -a "MarsEdit Authentication: <API Endpoint URL>" -s "MarsEdit Authentication: <API Endpoint URL>" -a "<Google Login>" -X `cat ~/Desktop/BloggerAuth.txt`

   This will create a new Keychain item on your new Mac containing the authentication information from your old Mac’s Keychain, associated with the requird Google Login and API Endpoint URL so that MarsEdit will recognize it when you try to connect to your blog.

6. Delete, or otherwise secure the BloggerAuth.txt file from your old and new Macs.

Migrate to a new Blog Host

We want to stress that this is likely to only be a short-term workaround. Blogger may invalidate the authentication credentials being migrated by these steps at any time, at which point there will truly be no way to keep things up-and-running with MarsEdit.