Ecto

I was reading this article on great Mac products and the very first one mentioned is a blog editor called Ecto. I was using my work laptop (Windows) when I read it, but noticed there was a Windows version. I decided to give it a try.

It uses the .NET framework, so there is a noticeable lag when it starts up. Maybe that will go away on Vista. Setting up my Blogger account required me to manually fetch the ID of blog and enter my credentials twice. The latter is just annoying, the former is something that I can't imagine most people doing.

The interface is pretty nice. It loaded all my old posts rapidly and allowed me to edit them easily. It also has nice support for Blogger's tagging system, err labels. It has nice integration with Flickr, allowing me to view my photostream from inside Ecto though I could only seem to insert a picture as a link, not an actual image.

All in all a promising product. I'll try it a few more times. I think the Mac is its "native" environment, so it might be better on there. Don't know if it's worth $$, but it's really pretty cheap ($18.)

Update: Turns out Ecto screws up Blogger's tagging/labels. That's something that Flock doesn't handle well either. That's too bad. Some MyBlogLog analysis shows that I get a lot of traffic via Google search for "foo" -> "foo" label on my blog. Definitely no $18 for the Windows version in that case. I'll try the Mac version tonight.