Blogging With Ecto – Curtis McHale

Recently I wrote a post about using MarsEdit as a desktop blogging client. In my quest for a decent solution I also took a look at Ecto.

Good

Any blogging client I use needs to have an HTML view. I write HTML all day and prefer to have exact control over my markup. Ecto gets one point in my book because it lets you write in HTML.

As I said in my review of MarsEdit I’m a WordPress guy so any client I use must work with WordPress. At this point I don’t actually care if it works with any other option. Ecto does work with WordPress as well as many other blogging platforms.

Ecto Supports lots of Blogging Platforms — that’s a lot of platforms supported

Another feature that is nice for Ecto is that it shows you all of the tags you’ve used as check boxes (just like your categories). For me it showed that I had a few tags with spelling mistakes (little embarrassing). The search panel below makes it pretty easy to find tags you’ve already used and if you search for a tag that doesn’t exist you can add it by simply hitting enter.

ectos tag screen — This is how Ecto organizes your tags

Bad

Above I said that Ecto works with WordPress, and it does, it just pukes all over WordPress Multisite. This site runs on Multisite and is the 3 blog registered. While it gets all the content fine it gets me three copies of the content on the site. I tried it out with another blog (2nd one setup) and I got me 2 copies of all the content. It doesn’t seem to screw with the content on the server so I guess it’s not that big an issue but it’s still pretty dang annoying.

Ecto dies on WordPress Mutlitsite — That’s a lot of blogging clutter

This complaint is totally a personal opinion, but I don’t think that the interface is very ‘Mac like’. Sure it’s totally functional but it doesn’t feel very refined to me. Please feel free to disagree with me if you’d like (I just think you’re wrong).

Just like MarsEdit Ecto automatically publishes the local draft live on your site. Since Ecto (or MarsEdit) does not support all of the WordPress feature set (and I assume it’s the same for other blogging platforms) it seems silly to me to post like that. At the very least I want to see a preference option to change the default option. Ecto does have a little green icon in the bottom of the left panel that lets you change how the post will publish but it’s not nearly as clear as MarsEdit.

Another minor point, but any WordPress person will notice (or at least they should). In the list of supported blogging platforms Ecto spells WordPress wrong. They forget the capital P. I know that gets under the skin of the WordPress core team.

The End

Overall Ecto is a pretty solid offering for desktop blogging. If I didn’t blog on WordPress Multisite I could use it as my only client but since I do the issue with duplication content/blogs is only going to get worse. Ecto is worth a look for you if you’re in need of a desktop blogging client.