« It might just save your life | ::: | BBC goes Fisher Price »
ecto
When I blogged from Windows, I got used to using an offline editor to write and edit my posts; it makes keeping track of more than one blog much easier. I started with BlogDesk and then, when it was launched into beta, moved over to Windows Live Writer. Both are good pieces of software, and both are free.
Unfortunately, both are also Windows only so when I changed to blogging from OS X I was a little stuck. For some time, I just wrote everything using the online editors at Wordpress.com and BlogSpot while I looked around for an offline editor that suited me. For OS X users, the choice is not as wide as it is for Windows users, but most of what is available is still free. Unfortunately, having looked at quite a lot of them I found that they didn’t play well with the BlogSpot (or new Blogger) API - which meant I couldn’t use them as I wanted to.
Then a friend introduced me to Flock, “the social web browser”; as well as being an excellent browser, Flock also has a built-in blog editor. This does play well with the BlogSpot API and I’ve been using it for a number of months. It does have its limitations - doesn’t keep a list of tags and categories, doesn’t keep a list of all the posts, can’t edit pages - but is still a very usable offline editor.
A couple of weeks ago, though, I stopped using Flock as my browser (see this post for details) so was once again left without a good blog editor. So I returned to some of the ones I’d looked at previously; most still don’t play well with BlogSpot but the big ones in the field - MarsEdit and ecto - do. I tested MarsEdit when I first moved to OS X and liked it; I just didn’t want to pay for something which - at the time - I wasn’t going to be using very much. I hadn’t taken ecto for a spin for a while, so fired that up to see what was up.
At first I was a bit put off. There were two main reasons for this. First was that for the BlogSpot entries, it seemed to add lots of unneeded line-breaks, so the paragraphs ended up about a mile apart. This turned out to be something that was set at the BlogSpot end, and once fixed there have been no further problems.
The second issue was opening old posts. While ecto does this without problems, most were opening as one solid block of text - no paragraph spacing or line breaks at all. This turned out to be a limitation of the editors that I’d been using up to now; ecto relies on proper HTML tagging to create paragraphs, lists and so on. Once I realised this, it was easy enough to correct any old posts that I edited using ecto.
Setting up a blog is easy - just use the Assistant, and pretty much all you need to do is enter your username and password. ecto will automatically retrieve past posts, and for any new ones you write it will present you with a list of tags and categories (if your blogging system uses them) and let you create new ones. You can also publish one post to several blogs just by dragging and dropping. On top of that, ecto will also allow you to edit any static pages your blog might have. It includes a spell checker, word count, the ability to create summaries and lots more.
ecto - which is available for Windows as well as OS X - isn’t free, but only costs £9.77 (around $18) and is well worth the money if you spend a lot of time blogging.
Comments
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
-
