Posting to Your Blog From Your Desktop Using Ecto
If you like working offline instead of using a web interface to edit and prepare articles, then there are number of solutions open to you.
Since I've recently come into possession of a MacBook Pro I decided to try out Ecto, which is one of the more popular solutions for Mac OS X (there are other versions available including Windows).
Ecto offers a free trial version, so I grabbed a copy to give it a go.
I get the impression that the software may not have been updated since the release of Movable Type 4, as some of the dialogue windows are slightly misleading.
Before you can make use of ecto you will need to access your services password.
Login to Movable Type and go to your user profile. You should see an option "web services password" which will be hashed. Just click on the "reveal password" link and your password will be shown in a popup window (unfortunately it's not HTML, so you can't copy and paste from it easily).
You then need to setup the account in ecto. Luckily that's very easy. It's so easy that even I managed to get setup within seconds! The only thing you need to change is the username / password pair. Instead of using your "normal" web password you will need to use the web services password, which I already mentioned. Once you've done that you will be up and running and the software will be able to retrieve all the necessary information about your various blogs.
Why use Ecto?
Why not is the easiest answer! Having said that it does offer a number of nice little features that make it an interesting and useful bit of software, such as its tight integration with other Mac OSX applications, such as iPhoto and iTunes. You can also easily add links to items on Amazon and tag them with your affiliate ID, which is pretty handy.
Being able to count the number of words, paragraphs etc., as you type is also an added bonus, as I'm always interested in knowing those kind of things.
Inserting links is a small bit awkward, as there isn't a button on the standard editing window, however when you do access the linking tool you also get more advanced options, so you can add a "title" tag.
All in all it is a nice little tool, though I'm not 100% sure if I'll buy a license - though I am tempted.
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