I tend to mutter and murmer and kvetch semi-silently about using ecto (or other blogging clients), such that folks wonder why I use them in the first place. Or, as Doyce IMed, “I have a great tool I use for posting. It’s called Moveable Type.”
So why do I actually use an external client, instead of MT’s web-based one?
Like most things, it’s easier to bitch than to laud, so I should give some of the nice stuff back. I’d actually slated to do that during the Blogathon, but didn’t get around to it. So …
The Good: Here’s a list of features ecto has that I find convenient (or that are unique to it vs. the MT Web interface).
- As an external client, no web windows to inadvertently close or have crash. Easy to save drafts.And ecto has an auto-save feature so that ever X minutes my post gets saved, no worries. [As someone who leaves drafts open for a while, and who occasionally has a browser crash, this has saved my butt repeatedly.]
- Integrated listing of previous posts, so I can easily re-edit something.
- Formatting buttons for bold/italic/underscore/strikethru. Also for left/center/right/justified paragraphs. Also for number points and bullet points. And blockquotes.
- Customizable hyperlink tool. [So I have have links open in new windows/tabs.]
- Integrated upload tool, particularly for images. And it remembers the directory I want files loaded to. And it remembers the <div> text I want it surrounded in to make the floating right (or left) little shadow boxes. [Priceless.]
- Integrated customizable “now listening to” tool. [Which I use rarely.]
- Integrated Amazon search-and-link too. Do a search for something in Amazon, and auto-insert a (customized) text, graphic, or both link, including your affiliate ID. [I’ve not used this myself, just started looking at it today.]
- Other, customizableHTML formatting blocks and/or text blocks. Thetext blocks I used in my comics reviews over the Blogathon? A matter of a few minutes to set up, then I could replicate them all night long. And I can do it the same way the next time I edit a comic book review. [This is fabulously valuable to me, and worth nearly any inconvenience.]
- Rich Text editor, so that you can actually see the italics/bolding/etc. you’ve put it.
- Web preview, using your own CSS, so you can see how things actually will look (more or less) when posted.
- Integrated spelling checker.
- Font and size control. [I don’t use them, since I’ve got stuff set up for this through CSS.]
- Prevent posting without Categories and/or Keywords being defined. [I set this on for Categories.]
- Automated e-mail notification to people of new posts. [I don’t use this.]
- Customizable conversion of keywords to Technorati tags. [Which I don’t use, but some folks would.]
- Entry templates, if you do various similarly formatted posts. [Which I don’t use.]
The Bad: I do mutter, and I do grumble. Here are some of the problems I’m presently havingwith ecto(most UI oddities, feature gaps, and bugs).
- Ecto currently either sets the post date to when the post is first opened for drafting, or updates everything (new posts and edited posts) to the save date-time.
- The comments flag sometimes magically blips off.
- There are some strange performance issues, where the program will occasionally lock up (and lock up some other stuff, too) for 30 seconds or so.
- Because it’s natively a MacOS program, there are some odd interface gotchas.
- Doesn’t do internal pings (trackbacks to other posts on my blog).
- A few glitches here or there, esp. when I download a beta/test version to play with.
Now, that all said, the programmer on this, Alex Hung,is very responsive on the product forum, and I’ve rarely had a show-stopper for very long. And, the fact is, I can bridge over via the MT web interface when need be. Which sometimes I do anyway, if I’m just tweaking something minor on a post.
Ecto is a pay product, though pretty cheap ($18). I also recommend SharpMT, which, except for the Rich Text / Preview features, does 95% of the above, is stable, and is free.
Now, are these tools absolutely necessary? Absolutely not. And if you’re a casual blogger — a post or two a day, tops, and just plain text, etc. — they’re probably not worth it. For me, though, they make my life a lot easier (when they cough work), and whatever pains I have with them are more than compensated by the pleasures and power they bestow.
And that’s why.
A note on the Rich Text editor. This is both more and less useful than it seems. It gives an approximation of how things will look (bolds are bold, italics are italic, links are underscored) and makes a post easier to review because of that. CSS-related formatting does not show up. And, as dealing with hidden codes in WordPerfect or Word, sometimes typing around the formatted text has unexpected results.
Also, it’s both a boon and bane in copying text from another page, depending on how that’s formatted. For example, on the patch notes post I made today, I copy-pasted the text from the patch notes page and it brought it over all bulletized. Beautiful and a huge help. Of course, it can also bring over unwanted formatting (fonts and sizes, when embetted in what’s there). One example of Alex’s quick support was adding in a “Paste without formatting” option which gets around some of that.
Could I have done the Blogathon without ecto? Of course — I have before. I also had to do, in the past, a lot more re-editing of posts in previous ‘Thons, where my formatting got messed up. And while I was able to use a text editor as a “copy” template for review blocks, it was definitely a lot more convenient to have something just a click away to do it.
See, and part of the thing you do that I don’t that makes Ecto more important is that you bring over formatted text, whereas I will routinely paste any text I’m using into Metapa (www.liquidninja.com/metapad) first just to strip out formatting, or write it in Metapad in the first place.
That said, just to be nitpicky about it being an ‘exclusive’ list, bog-standard MT 3.whatever does 2, most of 3, 4 (which is set up in configuration options), 5, sans div text, 10, and 11 (well, a non-issue, due to browser-integrated spell-check). I can see, in theory, how 8 would be a deal-breaker for you — it doesn’t matter to me much at all.
Still, good list.
And remind me that I’d like to borrow your code for post-subscriptions. 🙂
So you use an external editor, too, but still have to deal with cut-n-paste to the Web editor.
Bringing over formatted text is not critical. But it’s nice when it works or when I want it.
2. As a separate screen/window/tab. And one that needs manual refreshing. On the other hand, MT will automatically show everything, whereas unless I tell ecto to refresh, it only knows automatically the posts done from inside of it (vs. stuff done via the web or from my cell camera).
3. Yes, most of the formatting buttons are there in the Web interface. Though in FF they do that annoy jump-to-the-top thing.
Most of the others I don’t use. The bullets/numbered list functionality is pretty nice, though.
4. Not sure I follow you. Not aware of a configuration option to allow links to automatically target to “_blank”.
5. MT does about 75% of the job here (and the workflow on it is a bit annoying). Ecto lets me set up a template for my IMG tag as a whole (including the div text, which I jones for), and remembers the directory I prefer to upload to if it’s not the default MT or MT Archive directory. It also automatically prompts me for alt or title text, and gives some bit more convenient scaling options.
8. The text/formatting blocks I have:
– An Image div for aligning/framing IMGs.
– A blockquote format block that does what I want.
– A horizontal line with appropriate spaces around it.
– A “small” formatting block.
– An Amazon affiliate link I can put in, needing only change the ASIN.
– Ditto, as an image.
– A line break and div clear block.
– A red light, green light, and yellow light image.
– The two comics reviews blocks I mentioned.
I use some of these on a daily basis, others once in a blue moon. But it’s great having them.
10. MT’s preview is a “standard” format preview, which is better than nothing. Ecto does a true preview using my style sheet. I know (95% – it isn’t perfect) exactly how my post will look.
11. Agreed, if you have a spell checker in your browser (which folks should have.
Again, a person can easily do the job with the MT web client. You can do the browser job with IE5, too, or do your word processing in a text editor — but I wouldn’t want to unless I had to. 🙂
But to each, definitely, their own.
And I’ve been able to reproduce the Extended Post bug (“But wait, there’s more!”) for Alex, and he promises it will be fixed next update, which, in my experience, usually means very shortly.
And the fix for that was released yesterday, so as of this morning, that annoying bug (and several others) are gone.