This is one of those portmanteau posts – you know, a fabulous and not-entirely-practical construct used to illustrate a point in a story (often a shaggy dog one).

First off, I've been using ecto for a while, off and on, and while I found it most useful when I had a lot of images to pull into my big Maui post, I haven't been using it much since it upgraded to version 2.0. Mostly because I was struggling with the difference between "Rich Text" and "HTML" mode. It has some handy formatting buttons that only work in Rich Text mode, and some homegrown HTML tags and shortcuts that only work in, right, HTML posting mode.

I hadn't been entirely happy with the new way that Rich Text mode handled "blockquote," because I do some things with CSS to turn give quoted text a different color and indent it, and Rich Text mode adds other styling formats to blockquote that I don't like. And also, I couldn't figure out how to get OUT of blockquote while in Rich Text mode, unless I switched to HTML. And then I'd lose a lot of linebreak formatting.

If you're still reading this, I am most grateful to you. Sorry for the mess

Anyway, ***Dave has also been using ecto and mentioned that he'd been commenting at the support forum recently. Turns out there's a beta version which purportedly fixes some of these problems, which I have downloaded and installed. So let's see how it handles blockquoting now…

The Huffington Post: Peter Laarman: A Canterbury Tale: US Episcopalians in Manufactured Schism  

Whose side is the Archbishop of Canterbury on? That's what some moderate and liberal Episcopalians would like to know in the wake of Rowan Williams' rather chilly response to goings-on at the recently concluded Episcopalian convention in Ohio. Those goings-on included the election of a new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori.The worldwide Anglican Communion, headed by Williams, certainly appears to be giving American liberals the back-of-the-hand treatment while extending a generous right hand of fellowship to dissident U.S. conservatives. There is some possibility that Williams will not even allow the new Presiding Bishop to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference — a global gathering of all Anglican leaders that takes place once each decade. That would be a humiliating rebuke to the U.S. church.

On its face the fight is all about gender and sexuality. According to the Washington Post, Jefferts Schori once dared to use the expression "Mother Jesus" in a sermon; far worse in the eyes of conservatives, she allowed same-sex blessings to take place in the Diocese of Nevada, which she headed prior to her election, and she voted in the House of Bishops to endorse the consecration of openly gay V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.

Ah! this may or may not be an improvement (at least for blogging with ecto). A simple hard return and a "decrease indent" now seems to do the trick, rather than move the whole blockquoted element back over to the left margin as it did in the previous version.

I also wanted to verify that the "drag and drop" image feature has been improved.

Well, so far, not so good. It used to work, but now this post on the "support forum" indicates I have to

Yep, just tested and confirmed it works from Firefox. You'll need to drag the image onto the ecto button in the taskbar to bring the post window into focus first, not directly into the post window.

What? It doesn't work from Picasa or Windows Explore anymore, and it did before… I have to put the image in a browser window??? Drag to a button in the taskbar, which must now remain "always on top?" I don't think so, I'll just insert it with the now-handy paper-clip button.

At least my pre-sets seem to have come across. The above photo is of some of the little verbena plants that we gave out at the end of Mom's "Celebration of Life" party. These are the leftovers, which ended up making the front bed look very cheery when I left at the end of my week "at home" last month. More on that later.

A new, and intriguing button is the "Amazon Search" one. I have a little plug-in on my Movable Type installation that may stop working someday… and when I attempt to us it via ecto, I have to go back in and edit it in MT to get the plug-in to work. So let's see what happens next:

Tai Chi Beginning Practice [2005]

Hmm. Interesting, but doesn't include my associate ID, and it's stupidly set up to align to the center. Also, the paragraph tags picked up my drop shadow presets and all kinds of CSS hell broke out. The DVD is something I purchased in Salt Lake, though I haven't had a chance to watch it and attempt to mimic the movements much. I took a Tai Chi class years ago and it occured to me that I might like to take it up again. Anyway.

Let's see if the plug-in works via ecto now:

Tai Chi For Beginners

UPDATE: Nope, not unless I switch to HTML mode and make sure the brackets are entered just as God intended, and not as the Demi-Gods of W3 demand. I've got regular expressions working in a couple of my plugins that require brackets and not their more compliant equivalents.

Anyway, it's handy for searching Amazon, though it can't yet be customized with associate IDs. Bet I could ask for that.

Now, here is some really odd behavior. I'm apparently not getting out of paragraphs or divs properly, because if I start to enter text after an image in Rich Text mode, the text all gets the same drop shadow image applied to each subsequent paragraph. What's up with that? Obviously, I'm not getting this Rich Text mode very well. How do you make sure your cursor is not in the wrong HTML block element when you are ready to type more text??

Ugh, there was more badness under the HTML hood when I stopped to REALLY take a look. I have got to figure out how to deal with Rich Text. Also, my HTML tag snippets weren't invoked when I tried to use them in HTML mode. Why? Argh. 

More gnashing of teeth will occur later. There are some very nice features that ecto has that add functionality and make some aspects of blogging easier, but I keep struggling with items of the 'that's not a bug, it's a feature' sort that stem from programmer mentality more than anything. As in "users are stupid, and Windoze users are the stupiderest."

Meanwhile, I'll listen to a zippy jazz tune David and I found last night when we were looking for something to back up his latest work project, a business podcast. The subject of the podcasts is yet to be revealed, but the title of the tune is supposedly a sly reference.

iTunes: Yellowjackets: Silverlake: Samurai Samba [5:46]

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ecto, Movable Type