Solving a problem with ecto
Since I updated the theme a few days ago, I’ve been giving The New Wolfs Howl a bit of spring-clean. I’ve been getting rid of the clutter (no more adverts, etc) from the visitor side and I’ve been streamlining the admin side, getting rid of unwanted plug-ins and so on. Hopefully, you’ll have seen an improvement in the response times of the blog as a whole because of all this.
As part of this spring clean, I wanted to go through all the posts and get rid of all the clutter from the end of each one. This clutter has changed over the months - different RSS badges, Digg badges, etc, different disclaimers and so on - and I’ve never gone back through all the posts and made them all the same. As a result of this, some of the posts ended up with two lots of clutter as the theme template now adds that sort of stuff in.
Part of the reason I’d never gone through and cleaned all the posts up is because I’m lazy and I knew that there were lots that needed attention. But, as I now use ecto to write my new posts, I thought it might be a bit easier - just pull them all down into ecto and I could edit them easily and then re-publish them, without needing to get all bogged down in the inadequacies that plague the Wordpress editor.
At first, all was groovy. I had the most recent six or eight months of posts already in ecto (where they’d originally been written), so I could easily check those and edit the ones that needed it. The problem came when I wanted to download the ones prior to those, the ones from when I first started blogging back in March last year. They’re all up on the server, but ecto wouldn’t access them; it kept me giving me an “Is the access point correct?” error and that was it.
Looking at ecto support forums pointed me towards the answer. Apparently, my server was disallowing the downloading of my posts because I was exceeding the limit allowed for my installation of PHP. Looking at the ecto console log, I saw that I’d tried to download more than the 32MB allowed by the server. So I thought I was stuck. Then I remembered a similar problem with importing XML files into Wordpress - where the file size limit of the server could be changed by altering the .htaccess file.
Referring to my previous post, I went to my server’s cPanel and looked at PHP Configuration. According to that, the Resource Limit (a directive called memory_limit) is 32MB. But armed with the knowledge that I’d gained from looking at XML imports, I figured that I might be able to change that. I located my .htaccess file (in public_html), opened it and added php_value memory_limit 40M just before the final line and re-uploaded the file. It didn’t seem to effect the functioning of the blog, but the next time that I tried to download my early posts with ecto, I got them all. No errors, no fuss.
Having successfully got all my posts down into ecto, I’ve now re-edited my .htaccess file back to its original state (just in case).
If you’re having similar trouble and want to give my solution a go, just a few little things to bear in mind:
- Before doing ANYTHING, make sure you’ve got a working back-up of all the stuff you can’t afford to lose.
- Just because it worked for me, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. I only had about 360 posts that I needed to get down, and I was only about 1.5MB over my 32MB Resource Limit. If you’ve got more posts - or if they’re a lot bigger - you might need to change the 40M value to something higher. I have no idea if that will work or not.
- You could always try contacting your server host and seeing if they can increase your Resource Limit for you, so you don’t have to go hacking around in your .htaccess file.
- As always with the tips I give, remember that I don’t know what I’m doing. I just try things that I think might work; if they do, I write about them. In other words, I have no training in technical issues and I do not take any responsibility for anything that goes wrong with your blog / website / server / anything if you choose to follow my guide.
If you find a more elegant solution to the question of how to get all your blog posts down into ecto, please let me know.
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.
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