Blogging It Offline But Online
Ever since I started blogging and adapted to a CMS system, I’ve always used the built in editor of the systems themselves. The only time I didn’t was during my Alaska cruise since the ship had really crappy satellite internet, not to mention it was expensive. So, I ended up using NeoOffice to write my blog entries and waited until I got home to post them and that was sufficient for me.
But now, I’m interested in using an offline application to write up my blog posts, save them and publish them whenever I want to (and if I’m connected to the Internet). Copying and pasting the entry is all well and good but why not have a one click solution? So here I am, using a weblog client called ecto and so far, I like it. While I don’t have any means to manage comments, ecto’s pretty full featured by allowing me to not only write a post and save a draft, publish posts and delete posts, I can also lay out my posts if other elements are used (like images or flash movies), whereas I couldn’t if I used NeoOffice. I must admit, getting an image positioned just right through a WYSIWYG editor is still a little finicky but when I encounter such difficulties, I can just go into HTML edit mode and conduct my fine tuning.
ecto’s been able to retrieve my posts successfully as well as my About page and I can go through and view or edit them. When creating posts, there’s automatic spellcheck and I can also get a word count. Preview doesn’t show the posts in my blog theme but rather a basic view state akin to Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane. However, I did notice a template feature in one of the menus when I took a cursory glance. Perhaps I can modify the template to match my blog’s design? I’ll have to look into it further or read up on some support material. I am trying to see if I can send a draft to the server without modifying the Publish button to do so as I’d like to keep that functionality the same as my Wordpress interface.
It’s not without its flaws however, and I find myself using the HTML editor quite a bit (besides the aforementioned image finickiness, there’s also problems with editing link text while trying to keep the hyperlink reference intact). All in all, though, ecto is pretty darn nifty. and with a license being sub-$20, it’s very affordable and I think worth the price of admission.
While there are other clients out there (like MarsEdit and even TextMate), ecto is the first one I’m trying and I’m really pleased with it.
