Using ecto For Blog Posting
Greetings from Asia
One of the great allures of Internet Marketing is the lifestyle that it promises. Almost every Internet Entrepreneur that you run across will talk to you about the magic of being able to work when and where they want. In fact, Jay (from my favorite podcast Internet Business Mastery) recently moved to Buenos Aires ostensibly just so he could learn how to Tango. Now that is lifestyle management. He was able to do that because of the miracle that is the Internet (which was invented by Al Gore - not). Of course, what a lot of these Internet gurus fail to tell you is that they are totally addicted workaholics. But that, my friends, is a topic for another post.
As I have mentioned many times, I have a day job, and Internet Marketing is a hobby for me. This week, my real job has me in Asia visiting suppliers. It's a lot less exciting than it sounds, involving lots of jet lag, too many calories, not enough exercise, and too many different hotels. Anyway, I wanted to be able to do some work on the blog off-line on the airplane. I use WordPress, and the post editor (which is not that great) is an on-line tool. So, I started searching around for a good tool for off-line blog posting tool that would run on my Dell laptop.
It turns out that without too much searching, I was able to locate a tool called ecto. Now ecto is actually a "desktop blogging tool." I am not sure how it will behave off-line, but it is neat when you are connected to the Internet. Basically, you tell it about your blog and it interfaces to the blog backend. This post is my first try to use it. It is a pretty neat tool that is available for the Mac and for the PC. I hear that the Mac version is much better. Ecto has nice features -- YouTube, Amazon and Flickr integration, WYSIWYG editor, spell checking, category and tag support, and lots of other things that I have not investigated yet. I am still not clear if it will work well completely off-line (on the airplane). I'll be flying from Taiwan to Singapore via Hong Kong tonight, so I will test it then. Can you say "jet lag"?
Ecto comes with a free 21 day trial, so you can try it out yourself if you are so inclined.
Best regards,
Mark
Technorati Tags: blogging software, ecto, internet lifestyle
Best regards,
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Heah Mark
I got onto to your site through Garry Conn (he’s doing some design work for me too). Just a quick note to let you know that your link to Ecto doesn’t work
Enjoying reading, and learning from, your blog.
DaveK
Twitter: masonworld
(628 comments.) says:
Doh! Man, it’s hard to get good help these days. LOL Thanks for pointing out the error. Jetlag has a way of inducing typographical errors.
Garry Rocks!
Thanks for your comments and support.
I am looking forward to giving ecto a round for its (almost) money. I use Blog Desk for my desktop blog publishing. I really like Windows LiveWriter but it doesn’t seem to do very well for me. Blog Desk would be perfect if they had tag support.
I am going to give ecto a try. I think the other features you mention other than being just a simple blog publishing platform.
Twitter: masonworld
(628 comments.) says:
Garry — the latest thing I am trying is ScribeFire. Have you tried that? It is a FF plugin.
Hi Mark
Thanks for the link to ecto. I will definitely try it out. Have not tried desktop blogging before and it will be great if you can test the software out before purchasing a license to use it.
Twitter: masonworld
(628 comments.) says:
Thanks Marion — I think ecto is a cool idea. As it turned out, I finally just decided to work in the WP admin interface most of the time. If I am on a plane or something I just use notepad or wordpad.