Past Thinking

Ecto is a fully-featured desktop blogging application, that helps you get the most out of your blog. It allows you to manage your blog using a fully OSX integrated interface, compose posts offline, integration with iPhoto, manage your pings and trackbacks, and support for multiple blogs using multiple blogging engines. Its burgeoning list of features make this an essential tool for bloggers.

In this mini-review I am using ecto 2.3.7 for OSX.

Setting up Ecto

Setting up ecto is easy. Follow the wizard when you launch the application for the first time, and you will be connected to your blog, and your previous posts will be downloaded, along with images and categories. This blog is powered by WordPress, which uses the MovableType API (ecto tells you this if you don’t know it already), and all you have to do is enter the path to your XML-RPC file for ecto to work its magic.

So, ecto is very easy to set up. Why is it so useful?

Why use a desktop blogging client?

My particular scenario is that I would like to blog more frequently. I would like to be able to prepare blog content on my PowerBook when I am on the move, and have several articles on the go at once. I want to be able to use images with the minimum of fuss. I want to be able to ping weblog directories to let them know there is new content on my blog. I want to be able to add Technorati tags to my posts, trackback multiple URIs, spellchecker, iPhoto integration, and I want to see how my post will look in real-time.

Whilst I know that all of the above can be achieved in WordPress through the use of plugins, frankly, it takes time to set them up, and the WYSIWYG plugins have been far from perfect, with most of them having issues with formatting, XHTML validation and image uploading. You also, of course, have to be online to use them.

Ecto offers a simple user interface where you can compose complex blog posts in an OSX integrated environment. A full list of ecto’s features can be seen on the ecto website.

Here we have the two main screens. The window on the left lists recent blog posts (and the blog name, should you want to use it for multiple blogs - yes it does that too!), and on the right is this post in progress.

In the editing window (above) you can see that there is a divider, which you can move up and down to change the size of each partition. Anything above the partition will appear on the front page of your blog. Anything under the divider is the continuation of the article, viewed when the whole article is read (from clicking the “Read the rest of this post” link on this blog). The divider is essentially a graphical representation of the tag in WordPress. You can also click the “Summary” button which slides down a pane from the bottom of the window where you can type an excerpt for your post (for inclusion in your RSS feed, for example). In essence, this provides a simple graphical way of writing your excerpt, article introduction, and article body.

Rich Text or HTML editing

ecto offers two ways of creating posts. The default method is a rich text editor. This provides a near-WYSIWYG view of your post, as you type. It doesn’t align images at the moment, which is my main gripe, so unless your image is placed on a line of its own, text won’t wrap around it, even if you have aligned it in some way. Otherwise, it supports text alignment, bullet lists, numbered lists, and basic font formatting. It does this using XHTML, so, for example, if you make text bold, it is marking up the bold text as <strong>, rather than using the deprecated <bold> tag from HTML4 and its predecessors.

If you prefer, you can also create and edit posts directly in HTML. You can switch between the two views when you like. The buttons to do this are at the bottom left of the editing window (it took me a while to find these as I didn’t read the manual first!).

Images

I like to include images in my blog when I can. With ecto it is very easy. You can simply drag an image from the desktop or Finder, or click the iPhoto button to view your photo library, and insert one from there. By default, this creates a thumbnail linked to the original image. Double-clicking the thumbnail brings up an image properties window.

Normally, I’m happy to use standalone images, as in this article, so from this dialogue I can check the “Embedded” radio button, and take off the border (i.e. set it to zero). Because I understand the CSS behind my blog, I can use custom styles for my images (for example “alignleft” to align an image to the left with the correct margins). If you didn’t know much about CSS, you can use the HTML alignment options to position your images.

For this article, I am using inline images whose width matches the width of the text column (or thereabouts). Clicking the “Conversion” tab allows you to set a new width for the image, and check a box to convert it to JPEG, and play about with levels of compression. It is very simple to do, and saves time opening screenshots or photos in an image editor, especially if you get it wrong and have to repeat the process. To change an image in ecto, you can just double-click it and tinker with the settings whenever you want.

Extra Editing Goodies

Ecto throws in a lot of really good features. You can add links to items on Amazon (useful if you’re an affiliate), and you can even insert details of the music you are listening to in iTunes as you write. Right now, I’m listening to “Spirit from the album “Paper Tigers” by The Caesars” (text in quotes automatically inserted by the iTunes button in ecto).

Preview your post

At any time, you can click the “Preview” button on the editing window’s toolbar. This opens a window where a rendered view of your post is shown. You will notice here that your images should be correctly aligned (unlike the rich text editor). They will not be aligned by default if you have used CSS styles defined in your blog’s stylesheet. But cunningly, ecto’s developers have included the ability for you to customise how your preview looks, and so you can take the major CSS styles from your blog and pop them into ecto so that your preview mimics the look of the final published post.

If you are using the HTML editor, the preview window can be configured to update as you type. This can be quite slow on older systems, and it is quite odd to see things appear on screen twice as you type, both with slightly different appearances.

It is not clear, however, that ‘update as you type’ doesn’t work when you are using the rich text editor. Unless of course you read the manual ;-)

Assigning Categories to a post

One you have written your literary masterpiece, you will probably want to assign categories to it. When you set up your blog, ecto will have downloaded a list of categories from your blog. As normal, just check the boxes next to the categories you require.

If you have added any new categories from your blogging system’s administration panel, you can click the ‘Refresh’ button underneath the categories in ecto to update the list. Unfortunately you can’t create new categories from ecto, but this is understandable given the number of blogging systems ecto supports. It is likely that the XML-RPC interface doesn’t support this anyway.

Trackbacks

To trackback a URI in ecto, just click the Trackback button, and enter the address. You can trackback multiple URIs which is a great idea if your post is talking about multiple websites.

Pings and Update Services

Checking the “Ping” box on the options sidebar will ping the major blog update services (blog directories) such as Technorati. This means that these update services will be notified of new content on your blog, and they can scan your new post for inclusion on their listings and search facilities. Checking the “Make Default” button once you have ticked the “Ping” box means that you will always ping the update services when you publish a post (and you don’t have to remember to tick it each time).

Technorati Tags

Tagging your post with keywords allows systems such as Technorati to know what your post is about, and list your postings under the relevant category, or ‘tag’. The tags for this post, for example, are “blogging“, “ecto“, and “wysiwyg“. If you were interested in other blogs posting information about WYSIWYG editors, for example, you could visit the Technorati tag search engine, type in the word “wysiwyg” and see all posts from other blogs who have used “wysiwyg” as a tag.

This is a fantastic was of finding out what else in the blogosphere people are writing about. It has changed the way I use the web, insofar as if I am after personal experiences people have had on various topics, I don’t have to wade through millions of search results from Google. I can also work out what is linked where, and find out other, similar tags. There’s more to it than that, visit Technorati to find out more.
Adding Technorati tags on ecto is simple. On the sidebar, a click of the “Tags” button reveals the tags you have so far used since you have used ecto. You can tick ones I want to use again, or click the plus symbol to add a new one.

When you click “Publish”, Technorati will be alerted of your post, and will list it accordingly. That’s all there is to it (assuming you have clicked the “Ping” button at the top of the sidebar!).

Podcasting

Ecto can be used to add a podcast to a post. You can simply use the “Add Attachment” function from the “Drafts” menu, select your mp3 or QuickTime file, and ecto adds it in with the required enclosure tags.

Customisation and scripting

If the features I have highlighted above are not enough, ecto is fully scriptable. The ecto disk image comes with a folder of pre-built scripts, and it supports

• AppleScript
• Bash
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

Support and future directions

I haven’t had to use the ecto support forum yet, it has been so straightforward and enjoyable to use. What impresses me is the rapid response time from Adriaan, who maintains the OSX version of Ecto. Have a look at the forums, and you will see that most queries are answered very quickly indeed. Adriann recently posted a statement about his commitment to the support of ecto and acknowledges the support of other developers to the cause. It is precisely that type of feedback that warms me to a company or piece of software.

Adriaan is quite open about the future directions, and he has teamed up with Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire and ‘rival’ blog editor MarsEdit, to create a better rich text editor using the newly open-sourced editable WebKit. Rather than go head-to-head, they decided to collaborate, demonstrating great sense of community in the Apple developer world.

Conclusion

Ecto is a mature, stable blogging client. It has enough features to make it powerful, but designed in such a way that is isn’t daunting to use. I still haven’t read the manual (I will get around to it at some point!), which demonstrates how intuitive it is. It is quite obvious (to me, at least) how to perform most of the tasks that I need to do. I have tested MarsEdit, but found that it lacked many of the features of ecto, a little more ‘clunky’ to use, and more expensive. The only thing I liked about MarsEdit over ecto was its icons ;-)

When I first tried ecto, I was disappointed that it was not yet fully WYSIWYG, but heartened to read Adriaan’s post which announced that this is planned, now that WebKit has become an open source project. It was actually that piece of news that warmed me to the software, and encouraged me to buy the software to support them in these future developments.

If you run OSX, and contribute to a blog, I could not recommend ecto enough.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: blog, blog client, blog software, blogging, blogging software, ecto, wysiwyg