Mac users out there… what’s the best offline editor you have found for blogging? I’ve been using ecto for the past two weeks and started with it primarily only because I was familiar with it from the Windows side (where I’d actually moved to using Windows Live Writer almost exclusively). My trial period for ecto is winding down and so I have to decide whether to buy it or try something else. So I’m curious to ask you all:
If you are on a Mac, what do you use as an offline blog editor?
Are there other programs out there I should consider? I’ve actually been quite happy with ecto with only three smaller issues:
1. I like to include graphics at the beginning of my posts and like to right-align the images. If I put the image at the very beginning of a paragraph (which I often do with the first paragraph, but also may do so in the body of longer articles), the HTML code is initially like this:
<p><img …… align=”right”>….
And this usually works fine if I just write the entry in ecto and then immediately publish it. However, if I save the entry as a draft and then re-open it, or if I open up a published draft to edit it again, ecto automagically changes the HTML code to this:
<p style=”text-align:right”><img …… align=”right”>….
which, yes, indeed, right-justifies the TEXT of the paragraph. If I click in the paragraph and press the left-align button, it goes back to normal left alignment – until the next time I open it up. I have, however, forgotten to do so several times and wound up with right-aligned text. Clearly a bug and one I’ll be reporting to the ecto folks.
2. ecto does not support horizontal lines (<hr>) in its rich text editor and so if I want to use one (for instance, to separate an “UPDATE” piece of text from the main body) I have to switch to the HTML view – and remain in that view – or do the edit in TypePad’s web interface.
3. At least with TypePad blogs, it seems to set the time of the article to when I start writing it. However, when I go to publish the article, ecto does not seem to update the time. If I’m writing and immediately posting an article, the time it took to write the article is not necessarily a big deal, although it certainly could affect the placement of the article in sites like Technorati or other sites that list current articles (i.e. it will show up earlier than it actually was). However, when I work on a draft, save it and then come back to it a day or two later, I’ve been bitten several times by the fact that it posts with the original date… resulting in my “new” article not appearing at the top of the blog. I now have to remember to click the “Adjust Time” button before I go to post an article, which is something I really shouldn’t have to do. There should be some way to have it just automagically post with the current time. (And perhaps there’s an option here I’ve missed.)
Those are the only real issues I’ve had beyond the normal having to learn a new interface, new keyboard shortcuts, etc. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the editor. It’s worked well and unless someone can point me to something better I’ll probably pay to continue using it. I would, however, be curious to know:
What do YOU use for posting blog entries from your Mac?
Technorati Tags: apple, blogeditors, blogging, ecto, macbook, macbookpro, tools
I use wordpress for most of my blogging… although now you have me curious about ecto…. What I am interested in doing is keeping a backup of my blog posts in a place just in case my wordpress database crashes.
Hope you are having fun at the conference.
I’ve been happy with MarsEdit, it interfaces nicely with our MovableType blogs. I tried ecto as well, but ended up settling on MarsEdit (sorry, I don’t recall the exact reasons now.)
I definitely second MarsEdit. It’s a great client, and the new version handles the insertion of media files into posts perfectly, including media from Flickr. As if that weren’t enough, the developer just posted on how to tweak the ‘preview’ to use your blog’s CSS and template, so you have a letter-perfect preview.
Hi there – welcome to the Mac!
I’m glad to see some of your readers already suggested MarsEdit. Your first two complaints basically have to do with the shortcomings of Ecto’s rich text editor. The good news is MarsEdit doesn’t suffer from these problems. The bad news? MarsEdit doesn’t have a rich text editor 🙂
I would like to add rich editing to MarsEdit but up to now I have resisted for precisely the types of frustrating reasons you’ve encountered. I think it’s really hard to do HTML “generation” correctly, and I’m basically waiting until it becomes easier to do. In the mean time I’m putting all my efforts into other usability improvements in MarsEdit.
With regard to dates, the way MarsEdit handles the situation you describe, it simply omits the date from new posts and doesn’t send anything if you don’t set it explicitly. On most blog servers, this has the effect of making the date of a post exactly when the server first receives it. I think this is probably what you were hoping for.
Let me know if you try MarsEdit and have any questions,
Daniel
I’m running my blogs on Drupal (http://drupal.org), so it’s a little more challenging, but most of the useful editors seem to be able to function just fine for me.
I’ve personally tried ecto, MarsEdit, Qumana, and Adobe Contribute, and I’m mostly staying with MarsEdit at this point.
The biggest thing it’s got over the others is the media manager – I just drag an image (usually from a web page I’m blogging about) to the window, then upload & insert. No need to download the image to my desktop first. This is huge for me, as I have a group of managers I have to train in blogging, and the simpler it is for them the better.
MarsEdit also has built-in script for starting a blog post from a Safari page. This could probably be hacked to work with Firefox/Flock/Opera/Whatever. I’d love to see them do more with scripting – blogging gets tedious, especially when you’re supporting other users who don’t know any HTML.
Ecto’s not bad – used it for a while, and except for the media manager part it worked fine.
Qumana is a little nicer than ecto in my experience, but still lacks the media manager.
Contribute is a disaster. It attempts to show everything on the page rather than just the new post – it’s basically a website editing tool, rather than a blogging tool. Unfortunately it can’t seem to properly render blog content and surrounding elements – seems it doesn’t read the stylesheets from my blog properly. It may work better for blog-in-a-box solutions like WordPress/Blogger/ TypePad etc., but it blows with Drupal.
By the way it’s also worth looking at Flock’s built-in “Blog This” function. Just right-click on your current browser page and Flock sets up a new post with an editor window. Flock is free – and if you don’t care about the MarsEdit Media Manager, might work for you. Flock’s only minimally scriptable, alas – it’s got about four commands in its dictionary.
I am adding my thoughts well after the fact. I started blogging in October 07, and was trying out MarsEdit. It did not do something I wanted it to at the time. That may be fixed by now, I am not sure
I then tried Ecto, even though there were minor glitches mentioned about the most recent version and imacs. I liked Ecto, so I registered my copy. Then a few small problems showed up. It may have been me, or the software, not sure.
I had been using Bean for general writing, as it does everything I need. I now use it for blog writing. I write in Bean, copy and paste to WordPress – write. This does everything I need except a backup. I had Voodoopad already, so I started copying published entries to Voodoopad.
I know it is not elegant, but it works for me, or at least it does so far.
venagozar, Thanks for the comments. The beautiful thing about an offline blog editor is that it gets rid of the whole copy-and-paste thing. You can just write and then hit “Publish” and your post is uploaded. Once you get started working that way, odds are you’ll never go back! In any event, I’m glad your method works for you… and welcome to the world of blogging!
Dan
P.S. FYI, I’ll soon be writing a follow-up post about my use of MarsEdit and Ecto. Stay tuned…