The Power of Ecto

Finding time to post to a blog poses a serious challenge to many writers on the web, present company included. It’s understandable then, that I’m quite excited by a new tool that helps to make the process of posting to a blog that much more streamlined. Chris gets the credit for this one, as it was his comment over on Jason’s blog that introduced me to Ecto.

Ecto is a blogging client that acts as an intermediary between the writer and his or her blog. As much credit as the development team gets for their web-based rich text editing features in Wordpress, the fact remains that any web-based interface just isn’t quite as snappy as a true, full featured application. Tying into your blog via the XML-RPC specification. Created by a bunch of people who are smarter than me, XML-RPC is an avenue for platform independent, distributed computing that’s proving itself worthy of an extensive variety of exciting applications.

Setup is beautifully simple: enter your site’s URL, the path to your xml-rpc.php file, and finally your login information. Ecto then pulls down your latest blog posts, and provides both a rich-text editor and an XHTML editor with syntax highlighting, which is something I’d really been missing. On top of that, you’ve got all your controls for selecting categories, allowing or disallowing comments, and assigning pings and trackbacks right in the application. Get your post configured just right, then hit publish and that’s a wrap: no need to even touch the web based interface for your blog!

Ecto’s creators are asking $17.95 for a registered copy, which is pretty cheap when you consider how helpful this little app is. Follow the links below to download a trial version for your platform of choice!

Ecto - OSX version
Ecto - Windows version