ecto Thus Far

There are still some oddities encountered working with blogging client ecto. But I’m getting used to it. The nag screen comes up every time I start the thing, but I’ve seen nags that are much more obnoxious.

Okay, 3,2,1 let’s jam.

iTunes: Cowboy Bebop: Tank! (Opening Theme): Cowboy Bebop OST [3:30]

First of all, I’m still not clear as to whether I’m saving a draft, or publishing to blog, or saving a whole new duplicate post. I’ve had a couple of dupe so far. It’s probably a force-of-habit thing that I’ll get over. I do like the “auto-save every X minutes” feature, I’ve lost more than one blog post by hitting the “back” button or something equally moronic. But I’m still sort of baffled over my draft/save habits on this thing.

However, it’s fairly good on the ease-of-use front. When I’m in MT, I’m constantly distracted by the urge to tinker under the hood. And the entry screen isn’t big, and I just don’t feel like “writing” with a flow. Also, the ability to customize snippets of HTML is VERY nice. And the image handling is pretty good. Even with my customized stylesheets, it’s pretty easy to set up images so they “come over” into MT properly.

I was tickled to see that macros for auto-linked text, acronyms, and other text doodads work fine.

I’m pretty sad about some of the Mac-only features that I don’t get to use, particularly easy button-pushes for Amazon and IMDB goodies. And of course, the iTunes thing is much cooler on the Mac side, I had to install a funky but lightweight little app called WMPtunes, but at least it’s somewhat customizable as to the text it puts in. Heh, I bet I can even style it with inline styles. Will play with that… later.

I was able to set up 3 MT blogs, at least one Blogger blog (can’t remember if I did all of them) and most importantly, the WordPress blog that David put together for Riley. Which means that I don’t really have to learn the rudiments of WP or remember another login/password combo. And I’m pretty happy about that. 😉

Ooh, that reminds me.. I wonder if I can add all my smiley shortcuts? That would be damn handy.

Very, very soon I’m going to be making a decision as to whether I’ll pony up and pay the registration fee. Thus far, aside from the duplicate post thing, it’s looking like a keeper, and it will certainly be nice to work with “on the road.”