I’m a fan of WordPress – the software has made blogging easy to do. The software was easy to install, it is hosted by many hosting servicess and DreamHost (my hosting provider) offers a one-click install of the software. With the praise first part of this blog done – I have to add that writing in the web tool that is part of WordPress is kludgy. I’ve added a nice tagging plugin that I can access easily from the built in editor but that’s about where the joy ends – tags and categories.
So here I sit typing in my second new Mac application of the evening. I previously tried out TextMate but wasn’t sufficiently impressed to write a post about it or pony up the 39 pounds sterling to purchase it. It does a lot of cool things well but I’ve got enough free stuff that I’m generally happy with for Python and Java and my boss is a big Macromedia Dreamweaver fan so I suppose I could get that fancy-shmancy tool too if I asked. Anyhow, blog posting is about the only part of my digital creativity that sometimes is frustrating so when I saw mention of it on another blog I thought it was worth a try.
The software downloads as a standard Mac .dmg file and then runs smoothly as I expected. What appears nice about it is that it is only for blogging and the additional functionality that is included – HTML tagging and a ‘Send to Weblog’ button are about the only conveniences that I need. I’ll still have to categorize and tag my posts in WordPress but a client side app never hangs and if I can S/FTP my post up to my blog easily then – thank you very much, I’ll make the extra effort to do the other stuff in WordPress. WordPress’ rich text editing box also has some nice features but I just can size things in a way that makes me happy while using it. Going to try out the Preview and Send to Weblog buttons. More in a bit.
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So here’s part two: MarsEdit was indeed easy to use. After I straightened out what my user name and password really were for my site it uploaded everything without a hitch. Though my tagging plugin wasn’t activated it inserted Technorati tags which I think I’ll leave as is for the time being. Overall, this was a nice experiment. Have to weigh whether $24.95 is really worth the added convenience.
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Mac, WordPress, Digital Life, blogging
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[...] Ecto – Mac Native application for writing blog entries and posting them to your blog. Supports Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, and WordPress among others. Doug referred to MarsEdit as another alternative, but Ecto fits the bill for me perfectly. It includes spell checker, Amazon Web Services integration, templates, preview – really everything you would want in an offline authoring tool. [...]
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