Using Ecto Blogging Software
Reader Shawn Blanc pointed me to a great post of his covering ecto, a popular desktop blog publishing client for OS X. Shawn goes step by step through using ecto and explains the features. Personally, I don’t use anything to supplement my blogging and just write directly inside of the WordPress admin panel as I thoroughly enjoy the accurate post preview.
What do you use when blogging? I can’t live without my dictionary widget and capture widget - although I have been playing around with Skitch for screenshots. When it comes to posting web-friendly code, nothing beats postable.
I’ve been using Ecto for more than two years, but I’m currently trying out MarsEdit — development resumed after it was sold to another company — and I’m really digging the much cleaner interface.
Ecto has got quite a few more features, but MarsEdit is very easy to use and fine for most bloggers.
I used ecto for a while (mostly with LiveJournal I think)… now I often use Performancing with Firefox. It’s easy… especially if you want to add Technorati tags and a delicious bookmark of your post. I really like that I can easily post to seperate blogs with ease. Give it a try….
Performancing has recently been renamed to ScribeFire. Like Paul, I prefer the WP editor for the same reasons.
I have tried all of them and always fall back to posting directly in WordPress.
Great topic Paul. I recently had a similar question after I found a how-to over on Macinstruct, regarding MarsEdit. It was sold to redSweater from Gator.
I’ve been running performancing now ScribeFire for some time. An extension for FF, it has a nice internal pop-up type admin panel. It leaves you access to the webpage for right-clicks, copy+paste, source code etc..
I also just found or kodak companion which help me with images needed within the blog post. Drag and drop from a webpage > upload to flickr > grab flickr url > paste into SF. *note: it says that kodak is for kodak gallery only and fotofox for others like flickr, smug etc. I’ve found the opposite. Don’t ask me…
I tried the MarsEdit trial, but something about it being another app rather that the browser integration like SF bothered me, esp. when alt+tab in OSX doesn’t launch a minimized app like Windows.
Now, I’ve been running Camino and need to look into options for it as my optimized FF seems to be a bit wacky lately.
I used Ecto for quite some time before I questioned whether or not there were any advantages to using a blogging application when the inline editor and a browser worked just fine. The two things that stuck out most were 1) there is no need to run two applications blog (a browser works just fine), and 2) I hated swapping focus between the browser and Ecto when referencing an external article.
I’ve been back and forth between Ecto, MarsEdit, Performancing | Scribefire and just posting directly in Wordpress…
Lately I seem to gravitate towards MarsEdit, mostly, because it’s just “plain jane” — I like the -idea- of rich text editing, but I’m still enough of an recidivist HTML tweaker that I like being able to inline code while I’m writing. For me, that’s usually a lot faster than pushing buttons on the various rich text editors, or switching them back and forth between HTML editing and “wysiwyg” editing.
I don’t understand this postable site. Is this just to clean up the encoding of the text?
@Zach - if I don’t use postable, your browser will try to run the code I paste in my articles and royally destroy it. I also had an issue with improperly posted code messing up RSS readers, so postable converts things into their proper HTML encoding such as > ; for > etcetera.
I guess I am the odd man out, I still use ecto and love it. I like all the shortcuts, quick tags, word count, easy technorati tagging, image editor, etc, etc. My computer is certainly fast enough to have ecto and safari open at the same time and I find the shortcuts for creating links are much fast the going back and for in a browser which to me seems to always lag in time. Oh and Ecto does have a really nice preview that I’ve set to be the same size as my posting space on my site and it’s always been accurate for me. Plus I like having backups of my posts.
But if I wasn’t going to use ecto I’d use flock or WP-Admin.
I like to write the HTML code myself and therefore the only editor that I use when blogging is Textmate. I think you already know it, so I don’t have to explain everything in detail.
There are 2 blogging bundles out there:
http://macromates.com/blog/archives/2006/06/19/blogging-from-textmate/
http://www.ditchnet.org/blogmate/
For people who write everything by hand and are lucky enough to have a mac, I think Textmate is the ultimate editor.
Greetings
I use scribefire. Simple and clean.
I tried using the UB version of Ecto but it just locks up when attempting to retrieve my categories.
that might explain why it’s not working (ecto) for me since my upgrading to a macbook yesterday. Are there any fixes for it?
I’m buttting into this one a bit late, I know, but I’ve been thinking over ways of improving my blogging productivity and come to the conclusion that my own needs are best served by a combination of WriteRoom, TextMate and MarsEdit. The key to efficiency is preparing a post sequentially and separating the writing stage from the coding and the posting stages. I summed this up in a short review that comes to a slightly different conclusion to Shawn’s.