I stopped using Ecto, my favorite offline blog editor, a while back because it ate a number of draft messages and tag support with Ultimate Tag Warrior was always broken.

I went back to the Rich text editor in WordPress, which I can’t stand for a number of reasons: it’s slow, unresponsive, doesn’t preserve text between rich text and edit html mode.

At the time, I was on Tiger, blogging in Firefox, with PPC Powerbook. Talk about a recipe for slowness.

I blogged a lot less after a while. Then I started tagging and posting items through Delicious. Then I got really lazy and started Twittering everything.

Ecto 3 is in beta, and it supposedly works well with WordPress and Leopard. No more Ultimate Tag Warrior- WordPress supports tags natively and they were smart enough to let third party developers create tag management system.

Now I have to figure out details like getting ordered lists to stop printing out in Arial and dealing with images. While I’m at it I’m going to import my blog CSS into post drafts, easy to do in Ecto, between that and the new WebKit, WYSIWYG blogging is finally here.

People say Windows Live Writer is even better than Ecto, which is saying something.

The new WebKit-based Ecto is smoove. Some nice eye candy for trackbacks and search & replace, along with a zillion other improvements, big and small. Definitely worth checking out if you’re not happy with web-based blogging.

I haven’t used Flock much, which has blogging tools built in, or Performancing, which pops up a layer to edit a post over the web page you’re browsing. Makes quick work of simple posts, but lacks enough must-have features for it to stay in the uninstalled Firefox extension folder.

Speaking of FF, I can’t wait for version 3. The memory leaks kill me, very slow response to input, lot’s of spinning beachballs.

For a change of pace, later on I’m going to MIT to hear the producers of Heroes discuss:

…Their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audiences.