The Progress Bar

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.

For most people, blogging is writing for a few minutes a day and going on to their other tasks. I like working on the blog system and tweaking templates and doing custom installs for clients as much as I enjoy the blogging process itself.

I’ve been blogging since 2002. I started on Movable Type and stayed on the platform when I moved over to Corante, the very first blog network. When I moved back to my own url, I decided to check out WordPress. My blog, although it doesn’t look it, has a lot of plugins and customization, so I go for the self-installable version. At some point managing my blogs in Movable Type was becoming a problem, and I thought that perhaps WordPress would make it easier to admin my blogs.

Guess what, I was wrong. At the time, WordPress had, and still has, just as many issues as Movable Type, which went in the direction of corporate dollars and is now swinging back around to offer an open source version after watching WordPress run away with  the free sector of the blog software market. My two main gripes were that both platforms (and their underlying blogging protocols)  failed to play nicely with desktop blogging clients like Ecto and lacked a serious tag management system. Ultimate Tag Warrior is my weapon of choice; both amazingly powerfull, under-developed and undocumented, a frustrating mix. I remain hopeful that WordPress 2.3 will roll out built-in tagging tools.

Now Movable Type 4 is out, and I stand at a crossroads. WordPress gets under my skin often: IMHO, open source != well written software, frequent feature updates or bug fixes. Which leads me to think out loud, will MT4 be any better than WP 2.2? I’ve set up some very cool blog systems using both platforms. Perhaps it’s time to check out Movable Type again. Reading the MT4 docs, it would appear so.

Especially interesting is the ability to run multiple blogs off of one installation, similar to WordPress MU. My problem with WPMU is that there have always been plugins that I want to use that are not supported.

I will hold off saying more until I’ve had a chance to kick MT4′s tires thoroughly. In the meantime, I just found out that an Alpha of Ecto3 is out in the wild. I can’t wait until it’s stable enough for day-to-day blogging. It makes you a better blogger, guaranteed.

I just added about 10 very cool links to a draft post in WordPress and deleted it by mistake. Where is the undo feature? It’s times like this that I miss Movable Type and Ecto.

You would probably like the flexible OLED screens. As for the rest, you probably knew about Compete’s new API and most of the other stuff I linked to.

Took me a while to figure out why Ecto wasn’t downloading posts. turns out WordPress 2.1 has a bug. Fix via NSLog();

Ecto is a fantastic blog editing tool. Unfortunately, getting it to work with WordPress when advanced tools like Ultimate Tag Warrior are involved (for doing many cool things with tags like indexes, clouds, etc.)

This page contains a much-needed tip and links to everything you need to do to get the tri-fecta of Ecto/UTW/WP playing together nicely.

Ecto is a fantastic cross-platform blog editing tool. Makes writing posts incredibly easy compared to web-based tools.

I’m having a continuing problem though which I posted http://bb.infinite-sushi.com/viewtopic.php?t=2045. Never got any reply so I’m trying the Lazyweb.

I checked out the Mac Console today while dragging and dropping images into draft posts and see the following:

DRAGnDROP:
2006-11-07 15:36:17.802 ecto[21933] *** Canceling drag because exception ‘NSImageCacheException’ (reason ‘Can’t cache image’) was raised during a dragging session

USING IMAGE UPLOAD BUTTON:
“Can’t cache image”

Recently I cleaned out the image cache by deleting hundreds of cached images. I hope this didn’t do anything?

I have about 10 GB free on a 100GB disk, cleaned out for more space but that shouldn’t be a problem that I can see.

Anyone have an idea?

Ecto is my blog writing software of choice on the Mac for a variety of reasons. Yesterday, for some odd reason, it stopped letting me add images to posts. I did remove some languages from OS X to free up some disk space, could this have been the culprit?