Whenever I needed to do a post with more than text I usually fired up Windows Live Writer, which I thought I was slick... up until I discovered that it was capable of producing some pretty ghastly broken HTML. Since then I've been taking my risks editing in ye ole' browser.

I am still doing that, but I've stumbled across a clever tool that has made some of the more repetitive tasks of blogging easier: iClip, which I picked up as part of the MacHeist promotion. iClip is very simple: it stores the last few things you've copied to your clipboard and lets you copy them back out. It comes with a sidebar that you can pop in and out as you need. This isn't novel -- Microsoft Office has had this feature for awhile -- but its the first time I've been able to use it system-wide, which is where it becomes much more useful.

How does it save me time? As you can see from my previous posts, I like to put a lot of photos in (usually from Flickr). Without iClip, I have to go to the page for one photo, copy the HTML, switch back to the blog entry compose tab, paste in the HTML for the photo, and repeat again for every photo in the post. With iClip, I can copy the HTML for several photos, then go to the blog compose page and paste them all in. This is a huge time saver. iClip can also save me time when I need to copy multiple links or copy a link and text for that link.

There are many other ways it can save time, but blogging ranks high among my most repetitive copy-and-paste tasks, so I'm glad to have a tool like iClip now. This has led to some OS juggling as I do all my photo-processing on my Windows desktop and then crack open my MacBook Pro to start the Flickr HTML copying. Someday this whole Flickr-blogging integration will work right (Vox is close, but not quite).

FYI: of the software I got with MacHeist, iClip is the only one seeing regular use, though I do occasionally fire up TextMate and hope to figure it out soon.