Ecto - Blog Client

Having tested out MarsEdit, I decided to revisit Ecto, which I already own, although I have version 2.4.2 and it is up to 3 something.

One of the things that got me looking at blog clients was reading old posts where I would have a line like this posted at the end:

You Shook Me All Night Long from the album "Back In Black" by AC/DC

It used to be popular to post what you were listening to as you wrote your blog, and Ecto has a button for grabbing the current song. I usually just found a song that matched the theme of a post and inserted it. It also served as a random way to listen to music. I'll go search on the word random and see what I find...

Random from the album "LA poem project" by Claire

That's funny. I'm now listening to something Claire did for school.

So let's test posting an image. I just made a snaphot of the ecto toolbar. Since it is fairly wide, I shrunk it down a bit and saved it to my desktop. Since there is only an iPhoto button in the toolbar, I am going to select the menu item Draft... Add Attachment...

It came in stretched. I see the image dynamically changes size but does not maintain proportion, so that leads to distortion. Double-clicking brings in all kinds of options, one of which says to just embed the image without a thumbnail. That solved the stretching problem. I also see a "Destination" field which I'm guessing is the directory, so I typed "2010". I'm reminded that Ecto supports thumbnails for photos, so I'll come back to that. Now clicking Publish...

That worked great. I can already tell I like Ecto better because it does a lot more. However, that isn't necessarily something Mom or Carol would be interested in. They might find MarsEdit's simplicity more appealing. However, MarsEdit does not help with one of the biggest problems... modifying a photo for web posting (so you don't upload something so huge that it is slow to render or fills up the screen.

Speaking of huge, I'll upload this screenshot from Apple.com the other day. It was so big, I had to turn my monitor sideways to get the full shot. We'll see how Ecto handles that. Since I happened to store that image in iPhoto, I can click on the iPhoto button...

It made a tiny thumbnail for me. When I double-click on the thumbnail, it opens a window where I can make all kinds of changes. I only changed the default directory to 2010, but I can see I could have scaled the original to make sure it is not too large. That's helpful. I'll to spend more time with Ecto... even if it is abandon-ware.