Ecto Reviewed
If you have more than a couple of blogs then you will know that it can get pretty difficult to keep track of logins, usernames, posts etc. not to mention the fact that it is a little frustrating simply logging into so many blogs on a regular basis.
Luckily there are a few tools out there that can really help you with organising all of your blogs and posting from the one little program.
I have mentions Performancing for Firefox before and to be honest, I hold out BIG hopes for that plugin. In fact the main problem I see with it is simply that it doesn’t yet allow trackbacks, which is why I don’t currently use it exclusively.
There is another tool, however, that does allow trackbacks and a whole lot more.
Ecto is a desktop application that I have decided to play around with. It is available on both Mac and Windows for you to organise and post to your blogs.
The interface is pretty straight forward (though not as elegantly simple as the Performancing Plugin). You can list all of your blogs in a window on the left of your screen and select which one you want to post to. It stores all your passwords etc for logging into your blogs automatically as well as displaying recent posts.
You can edit posts wth HTML if you wish when you are writing them. There is support for tags and it also supports trackbacks to other blogs which is nice (though this only seems to work on certain APIs which took me about an hour to figure out after searching through their support forum). There is also a spell-check which is a great feature and badly spelled blogs look very unprofessional.
One problem I found was that I couldn’t upload a graphic using this program because it only supports that function for Movable Type and Typepad (I use Wordpress).
The documentation is *ok* without being great. For example the trackback problem I encountered had nothing about it in the documents and I had to go to the forum. I think that subject is elementary enough to include in the documents.
There is a 21 day free trial that you can take advantage of (which is what I am currently doing).
The price is pretty reasonable too at under $30.
It the moment I am weighing up whether to purchase Ecto or to hold out for the next Performancing For Firefox upgrade.
At the moment I would certainly encourage you to take advantage of the free trial and make up your own mind about it. This is a solid piece of software and if I wasn’t so enamoured with PFF I would certainly have bought it already.
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