All Forces

As I grow tired of the inefficiencies of web apps, whether it’s having to hand code html or waiting for my form submit to redraw, I discovered ecto. A wonderful iLife, Addres Book, Amazon, Technorati, del.icio.us friendly web standards compliant desktop blogging App. Woosh, say that three times. ecto also has an internal subscriber’s database where you can add subscribers who want to be notified by email when you post. ecto supports multiple blogging systems like WordPress, Moeveable Type, Type Pad, Blogger etc. and it’s only $17.95. It has an excellent help guide with plenty of screenshots and a very active forum where the developer quickly answers any questions users might have. The App sounds impressive on paper, so let’s set it up and take it for a test drive.

Step 1: Download and Install ecto
You can download a demo of ecto here. To install ecto, just move the application icon to your Applications folder.

2. Launch etco and add your Weblog
When you first open ecto, follow the guide to set up your first blog.

Enter the url of your blog. In my case my blog is at the root of my website. But yours might be at http::/yoursite.com/blog/

Select your Blogging System and its API. In my case I use WordPress which supports the MoveableType API. The Access point is the location of the RPC file.

Label the name for this Blog. This will only show locally in ecto. It does not affect the Blog name in your website.

Set your settings and you should be ready to go.

Step 3: Edit Templates


Once set up, ecto will download the content of your Blog to your computer.

The first thing I did was to edit the Template’s Preview CSS so that they match my blog’s CSS. This is important because I want to preview it with the same Font, Color and Image attributes as my site. I was also interested on getting the Width of the body to match the Width of my post column on my Blog. That way I know how the text breaks down length wise. One thing i did not like was the fact that in ecto, the CSS specified in Preview are not used for the editing window. Hopefully this will be corrected in a future release.

Step 4: Posting with ecto
The ecto editing window is very intuitive.

You can save a draft, publish, add images from iphoto, add itunes song info or an amazon associate link.

My favorite buttons are these. Well, two of those. The iTunes button is almost useless. It only grabs the song info of the selected song in iTunes. If it could bring the Album Cover, a whole playlist or the actual MP3, then it would be a killer feature.

iPhoto Interaction

ecto gives me access to iPhoto’s Library.

When importing an image from iPhoto or anywhere in your computer, you can rename the file, change formats, resize or make a thumbnail, create a link to a bigger version of the image. What’s more, you can save these options as presets. For this post, i dragged the screenshot PDFs straight from the desktop into the edit window. ecto saves a cached version of all the images so that you can reuse them in future posts.

Amazon Access

My second favorite tool is the Insert Amazon Item where I can specify my Amazon Associate ID and search Amazon right from ecto. Click on Create Link and ecto inserts the link according to your settings of Image Size, Link Type etc. This is a time saving feature that is designed very elegantly.

Step 5: Publish
Before publishing, set the Options for Category, Tags, Comments, Notifications etc. And don’t forget to write a summary of your Post.

Hit the magical button when ready to publish. ecto will connect to your blog and submit the post including the upload of all the images. Yes you read that correct. It uploads too.

The Bad and The Buggy
ecto worked really good for the most part. I found two bugs while writing this post. The first one was that relative links to previously posted images did not preview correctly. The ecto developers fixed this within hours of my post on their board. The second one was that I had to redo all my images for this post after closing my edit window and reopening it. I told them about it yesterday and just got this response today “You found a rare bug. Fix will be out today.” wow. Try that with a big Software Company.

Bottom Line
Rich Text editing, iPhoto integration, Amazon Associates, email notification, automatic image uploading, a local version of my blog and the fastest software fixes I’ve ever seen in my life all for less than $18. I think I found my new way to blog.