Someone on the ProNet mailing list mentioned ecto today. It’s a desktop blogging client — seems like a good one.
ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, Drupal, Nucleus, Blogger, and more. ecto is the successor of the wildly popular Kung-Log…
There’s a lot of templated stuff so you can save snippets of this and that to reuse them. File upload is comprehensive with the apparent ability to create thumbnails and automatically generate templated HTML for uploaded images.
Categorization is fantastic, allowing multiple category selection on first draft instead of having to save the entry first. Additionally, the categories are right there in a nice little sidebar rather than being buried in some other window. Because of this alone, ecto would improve your site architecture if used over time, because Movable Type’s kludgy categorization system (you have to save the entry first, then pop a window, etc.) is the biggest barrier to effective categorization of entries, which is too bad.
Another nice touch: when you highlight text and click the hyperlink button, it sniffs the clipboard and automatically pastes the contents if it’s a URL. Doesn’t seem that handy until you use it. Good spellchecking too.
Here are the bad parts: (1) It’s buggy. I got a lot of .Net exceptions. But this is under active development, so we can cut them some slack until they get it cleaned up. (2) It ain’t free. But it is only $17.95, and that’s a really good price for this functionality once it’s a little more polished. I’d pay it.
Six Apart Professional Network Overview: This looks like a bribe to get you on a mailing list. The Six Apart Professional Network consists of a number of benefits designed to help you get the most out of Six Apart's Movable Type, TypePad, and TypeKey platforms. Whether you're a consultant, designer, developer,…
Multiple categories? That sounds like exactly what I need (I run a Drupal site and make use of the taxonomy features there). I haven't been able to find any other software that will do this. Sadly, it doesn't run under linux. I'll have to try to get it to work under wine. Thanks!
Brian - The new ExpressionEngine from pMachine http://www.pmachine.com allows multiple categories per post, but it's not a desktop client if that's important.
Well, Movable Type offers multiple categories per post. My point was that the default MT interface is really kludgy for good categorization, while ecto makes it much easier.
Boyink--As does the Drupal CMS. However, I was looking for a desktop client for linux that would allow me to take advantage of this. Currently, BloGTK and the like only let me pick one category. Ecto would let me pick numerous ones (reffered to as taxonomy terms in Drupal speak) but it doesn't run on my OS. I guess if I mess with the BloGTK code enough, it could.
