Ecto started acting up on me lately. It may be because of new hardware, new version of WordPress, whatever. It’s just not a smooth as it once was. I’ve also been looking around and reading other reviews about blogging software on the Mac – and one term keeps resurfacing when it comes to Ecto: Abandonware.
It shows. There haven’t been many posts about Ecto, no new versions, even their support forums are down (due to technical error, but still..)
So now I’m on the lookout for a possible replacement. After reading a lot of different blog sites and reviews, I think that if I had to replace Ecto, I’m down to two options, well three, really – more on that later: MarsEdit or WordPress.
Before I get into that, let me explain what I’m looking for in an editor and it’s a simple thing: MAKE MY LIFE EASIER. It’s hard enough to actually write something for public consumption – much less just write about something. I don’t want to have to worry about CSS files, <div> tags, formatting, etc. I just want to be able to write some content and post it to a site that doesn’t look like everyone else’s. (Not really c
oncern if anyone actually reads my stuff – but if I can help someone.. great.) If the technology starts getting in the way of providing the content, then it’s just too hard. So given that…
If you have a modern browser, the latest version of WordPress comes with a pretty good blog editor. Coupled with a good WordPress theme, you can have a very good looking and functional site without having to know or deal with too much “technology”. Coupled with their iPhone app, it’s pretty easy to put content together.
However one of the items I’m always looking for is an easy way of dropping in a graphic like I would in Microsoft Word or any other text editor. I don’t think the WordPress option will allow me to do that. So I had to look elsewhere.
Now the latest version of MareEdit allow for a rich text editor – hopefully allowing me to bypass all the html coding it would take to simple add a image to my blog posts. So I’m giving v3.4.2 of MarsEdit a shot. I’m even writing this blog post with it. So far, for someone of my needs, MarsEdit and Ecto seem to be pretty close in functionality. Let’s see what the next couple of blog posts turn out.
oh.. and my third option: LiveWriter. Yeah.. I’m actually thinking about running a VM with Windows just to run LiveWriter again. Shame if it came to that.
-JT