Ecto Blog Editor, 2.4.1 for Mac OS X
Pros: feature-rich; stationery templates; pings; preview; automation; inexpensive; handling of categories and tags
Cons: a few minor glitches, but then it has to interface with a ton of other people’s software
Rating: 5 out of 5
Technorati Tags: blogging, Ecto, Mac OS X, reviews, software
Recently I discussed the issue of integrating Technorati Tags into my Movable Type blogs in my daily blog. A kind reader pointed me to Ecto, a blog-editing tool, explaining that it did a great job of integrating Technorati Tags. So I decided to take a look.
The first thing that caught my eye is that Ecto is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. That’s a rare and valuable feature as far as I’m concerned! Just to put things in context, this review is based on the use of Ecto 2.4.1 for Mac OS X.
At first I had a little bit of difficulty getting it to work–I thought I was doing everything correctly, but the nifty automated setup that fetches the information for your blogs (and yes, it can handle multiple Movable Type blogs and so on) just wouldn’t work. So, I checked out the support forums on the Ecto website. I was frankly amazed at how thorough and helpful they were, and how well the developers seem to answer everyone’s questions. It took me very little time to find the answer to my question (it seems that MT 3.2 introduced a separate password field for the function Ecto uses to access it, so you need to set that password separately) and get things fixed up and running. Otherwise, however, Ecto does a great job of auto-detecting most types of blog software and setting certain things appropriately. It’ll automatically fetch all of the categories for your various blogs, for instance, and you just check off the relevant one(s) for each post.
One of the first really cool discoveries I made was the ability to create templates. There are certain things I put in review posts that go into every one, and it’s incredibly handy to be able to save those bits of text. You can save settings in your templates such as whether or not to ping or allow trackbacks. You can easily add tags to a list Ecto maintains, and then check off the relevant ones for each post; Ecto will then insert the Technorati Tags in a spot where they’ll get indexed and even format them nicely. You can also save settings differently for each blog you maintain.
You can import things from iPhoto, get a word count of an entry, insert the details of the iTunes music you’re listening to right now, check a detailed console log for more information when you get an error message, create an Amazon link (with your associate ID!), and much, much more. Honestly, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Ecto can do for me and I already love it far more than the basic MovableType interface. HTML tags are printed in different colors, so it’s easy to tell when you’ve forgotten to close a tag.
Ecto interfaces particularly well with Movable Type, including support for summary fields, keywords, and the extended entry field. At first aesthetically I found it unattractive–but that was only until I discovered that you can muck with all sorts of appearance elements such as font. You can save posts for as long as you like, editing them at will, and then post them when you want. You can tell Ecto to warn you when you’re about to post an entry without a summary, keywords, etc. and to ask for confirmation before posting. There are so many features, in fact, that I recommend reading the Ecto site for more details, because there’s just no way I can cover them all here.
Because there are so many features it does sometimes take me a bit of time to figure out how to do what I want, and some of the possibilities seem a little intimidating to dig through. However, I look forward to gradually gaining more and more proficiency with this as I go, and it isn’t as though this in any way keeps me from getting more out of Ecto than I did out of the basic MovableType interface–it just means that I haven’t made full use of the fantastic variety of features yet.
I’ve also noticed when reading through the support forums that when the answer to a question is “I can’t do that because X service doesn’t support it” or “I can’t do that because X service changed this thing in their latest version”, the support folks often go on to say that they’re putting a workaround into the next version, you can fix it by doing Y, or they’ve submitted a request to the relevant service to do Z. In other words, there isn’t any “that isn’t my problem” attitude–they seem to be all about getting the job done.
Despite all this–the vast array of features, the wonderful customizability, the helpful customer support forum and FAQs–the software is inexpensive. This made my decision to purchase the software easy enough that I did so long before my trial usage had expired. I can’t wait to play around with future versions of the software, and to learn yet more of its inner workings!
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