Blogging with ecto
Filed under: Apple, Internet, PC, Software — Malcolm Owen @ 9:38 am
So. You’re writing away on the perfect blog post in your friendly neighborhood browser window, and suddenly the internet connection dies on you just before you hit submit. You get the Page Can’t Be Displayed error, and so you quickly hit the Back icon to revive your work. Sadly, in quite a few cases, it isn’t there. What could you have done to prevent such a tragedy.
On my Mac, I use something called “ecto“, which is a bit of blogging software that allows you to lay out the post, to put pictures where you want them, and generally prepare the post offline before posting it on the big wide internet world. Sure, you could edit the blog posts in Microsoft Word or Open Office, and quite frankly for the whole “writing” bit they would be better, but ecto does more than that.
Within ecto, aside from allowing you to write posts, it gives you all the options you need that are in your Wordpress control panel. Tagging, Categories, Time Delayed Posts and so on. You can even see a list of the most recent blog posts on the site, edit them within ecto, and then republish them with minor edits.
And as for you multiple blog managing people, you would probably like it for it’s ability to switch between blogs and blog systems with ease. For example, I can very easily edit Blatantly Random and then switch to the Stick of Wrong Dev-Blog, then switch back to BR, with no problems at all.
If you do a lot of blogging, I would highly recommend ecto. It works on both the Mac and the PC, and there’s even a 50% discount on a copy if you buy both versions at the same time. At the moment it’s in version 2, but soon enough there will be version 3, which promises some big changes if this one doesn’t quite tick all your boxes.