Blog software on Mac OS X: Ecto

Continuing with my coverage of blogging software for Mac OS X, which started with a post about MarsEdit and iBlog, let us talk a little bit about what I think is a better software for blogging on Macs: Ecto.

Ecto is made by Adriaan Tijsseling, a programmer who is author of other nice software for Mac OS X. The basic system allows the addition of multiple user accounts, in case you have more than one blog. Blogs can also be maintained in several systems, such as blogger, wordpress, and typepad. Each account can be customized to ping any service such as weblogs.com, and blo.gs.

In the main window, Ecto presents a list of blogs: when you click a blog, the most recent posts are downloaded and presented in a list on the right side of the window. Then, you can either edit an existing post by double clicking it, or you can add a new post if you wish.

The post editor can show a rich edit interface or a more basic HTML interface. I use the rich edit interface since it is very easy to use, with most of the common formating options. The post editor also gives full access to a system of Tags (or categories, if you use wordpress, for example). When you add a new tag to the post, Ecto automatically creates the necessary code necessary to link to technorati.

Ecto makes it easy to add pictures for your posts, in the case you use blogs with the wordpress interface -- this may be a problem for people like me, who use blogger. To solve this I need to access the post one more time in blogger to add the images I want. Ecto also has some advanced options, such as changing the time of the post, adding pictures from iPhoto, musics from iTunes, and wish lists from Amazon.com.

In the end, Ecto appears to be still a young product but already with a very good set of features. Certainly it needs to incorporate a more features, which would be necessary to provide a full solution for bloggers (like, for example, support for image uploads to blogger.com). However, I see Ecto already as a pretty nice piece of software, that should be at least tried by bloggers using Mac OS X - after all, it is only 17.95, and you get 21 days with the trial version.

Related posts:
Another Blog Editor for Apple Mac
MarsEdit: editing your blog on an Apple Mac

Technorati Tags: Apple, Review, Software