Blogging with ecto

Blue Sky On Mars has been around for six and a half years now. For the first time in all of that time, I’ve started blogging with a desktop client (ecto). Ecto is not perfect, but so far this seems like a really nice way to work. I particularly like how easy it is to include images (with automatic resizing and everything). WordPress makes it fairly easy now, but you still need to have the file on disk which is one more step away from what I get with Ecto. I can just snag an image, crop it as needed in ImageWell and paste it in. It’s just on the clipboard the whole time.

ecto feels a little rough around the edges. For example, I had to create a custom tag to do headings. After entering a heading, it doesn’t revert to normal paragraph style when I hit the next line. I couldn’t find a way to get out of list mode short of switching to HTML editing.

Rough edges aside, ecto is easy and worked well without hassle. I haven’t tried MarsEdit to see how it compares, and I’m certainly game for any opinions that people feel like putting in the comments here…