I’ve shifted houses recently and my access to good quality broadband has been a patchy, which explains why I’ve been a bit sporadic with these blog posts. I’m not always online when I get the urge to write. I could write it in Word and do a cut-and-paste I suppose, but I just don’t seem to like doing it that way.
Enter Ecto. Ecto is an offline blogging tool. I bought a copy a while back, simply on the basis that it was a damn good idea, even though I didn’t use it all that much and tended to just blog directly into WordPress or Blogger or whatever. But with my sporadic broadband lately I’ve rediscovered just what a cool tool Ecto is. It let’s you write your blog posts offline, with all the features you would get when online. It even handles Technorati tags directly in the application (which makes sense since the author of the software apparently works for Technorati Japan.) It has great support for linking and embedding stuff into your posts, including iPhoto and iTunes integration, time stamp adjustments, word counts, draft and publish control and so on… my only complaint is that I’d like to see better support for image alignment and text wrapping options, but maybe I just haven’t found that yet.
I never understood the name, but according to my dictionary the word Ecto means outer; external; on the outside, so I now see how that concept relates to an offline blogging editor. It’s available for both Windows and Macintosh, and you can check it out at http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/
Technorati Tags: Ecto, Blogging Tools
Funny Name, Great Tool by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
I use two similar products: Microsoft LiveWriter, which is a desktop application, and a Firefox add-on called “ScribeFire.” The great thing about ScribeFire is that it fits onto my PortableApp version of Firefox, so I just take it with me on my USB drive wherever I go. Even if I don’t have my laptop with me, I can just plug in and blog. They also feature some social networking options like Technorati and del.icio.us. I don’t know about the time stamp thing, though, which would be a really useful tool if you like to postpone publishing your blog posts.