ecto 3, my new best friend for productivity

The first rule of successful blogging is that content is king. to have a blog anyone cares about, you have to post, hopefully consistently and fairly often. If you run multiple blogs this becomes even more important. You need to post on each of them as often as possible to keep your readers coming back and get the attention of the search engines.

It’s bad enough to have to log in to multiple blogs to write your next post, but then there’s the visual editor of the blog platform itself. Web based visual editors tend to be clunky and error-prone no matter how hard the developers work and they have a nasty habit of changing what you type in them. If you are a Mac owner like myself, they simply don’t want to work with your mac, as many keyboard shortcuts that the editor expects also happen to control other parts of the system which can lead to a serious issue if you aren’t very careful.

If you’re on a mac and you’ve had these problems, try ecto. ecto is an all in one blog editing tool for Macintosh that has simplified my life immeasurably. I no longer have to log into multiple blogs to post. I no longer have to worry about the editor changing my code or even uploading images, ecto does all of this for me. Best of all, ecto uses the built-in Mac spell checking dictionary and follows Mac standard keyboard shortcuts. My routine has simply become something like: “Start at the top of the list and work your way down… Repeat.” having this ability keeps me on track and keeps me from forgetting to post on one blog or another.

Another advantage to having a desktop client like ecto is that it allows me to quickly turn the text from a website I’m viewing into a blockquote in a new post, with citation. This not only allows for quick and easy posting, but keeps me from violating copyright, as the source is properly cited and a link is automatically placed to the blog post or news article that I’m referencing.

The one place that ecto does not shine is in situations where you have a complex blog layout that requires the use of excerpts and custom fields to properly display posts. While ecto can do the job, it’s just simpler to use the web based editor and avoid the confusion.

In all, I have to give this piece of software a 9.5 out of 10. And in case you’re wondering; Yes, I’m writing this in ecto.

If you’ve been looking for a desktop blog client for windows, I’ll have recommendations for you in about a week when I get my micro-notebook set up.It will be my primary method for getting on the Internet when we move, so It has to be set up and functional as well. I just wish it ran Linux instead of Win-blows… Oh well. Can’t have everything, can you.

UPDATE: I should have done better research.  Ecto is available for windows as well as Macintosh.  (Why I didn’t see this when I looked the first time is beond me, but I just had to let all you windows users know.)

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