ecto is a blogging client for third-party and self-hosted blogging systems. It is designed to allow you to easily manage blogs in a variety of systems, such as MovableType and Blogger.

When you first start ecto, you are presented with a setup wizard. This wizard prompts you to enter the address of your current blog. ecto attempts to obtain information from this address in order to make the configuration process easier. In my case, ecto was unable to find the necessary information, so the setup process was somewhat manual. If ecto is unable to automatically obtain your blog's basic settings, it requests that you select the type of blogging system, and enter the 'access point' for that system. This would normally be a URL that points to an "XML-RPC" interface on the remote system. When doing my testing for this review, I was not aware of the needed URL, and had to refer to ecto's manual in order to enter the needed information. One possible improvement that could be made here is the inclusion of some example URLs for the most common blogging systems, or at least a pointer to the appropriate documentation.

After entering the correct access point URL, the setup wizard continues, asking for the username and password for the selected system, as well as prompting for configuration variables to use when posting to the new blog. Finally, you can select a 'mode' for posting: Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced. ecto's Basic mode displays only one window, for creating new posts. Intermediate and Advanced modes enable some other windows and toolboxes, including one for controlling the settings on a post, and another for viewing a list of the last 20 entries to your blog. This list of recent entries is also searchable. This is useful in case you want to refer to a topic from a recent entry, but can't recall exactly what entry it was written in.

In the main window, you can type in the main subject and body for your post, as well as add additional information such as a post summary or an extended post section. There are HTML formatting tools in the main window, as well as the ability to insert information on the currently playing iTunes track, and a function to allow you to drag and drop photos or other files into ecto for uploading. You also have the option to import photos directly from iPhoto's latest roll. This function could be more useful, however, if other albums or film rolls could be selected. If the photo you want is not in the latest roll, your only option is to manually export it from iPhoto and then use ecto's regular upload function to send it to your blog.

In addition to basic entry-editing features, ecto has a great live Preview feature. You can open a separate window which can be updated in real time to show exactly what your blog entry is going to look like. You must first give ecto the 'template' data from your blog, which you can find if you log into your blogging system's web-based interface. This is a boon if you are trying to do a complex layout for a blog entry.

To publish an entry, simply click "Post". This will communicate with the remote blogging server to save your entry. A small window opens to display the status of the communication with the server, and you can also open an even-more-detailed 'Console' window to display exactly what information is being sent to the server. This is helpful if you are having trouble with ecto, and need to send debugging information to the author or other support forums.

Apart from the ability to use your site's template to provide a preview of your blog entries, ecto cannot control the overall look and feel of your blog. This is a limitation of the API ecto uses to communicate with the server, which is only designed to manage the content of a blog, not the layout. You can, of course, customize the look of each individual entry by using HTML tags within the post itself.

ecto provides its own online documentation in the form of Mac OS Help. Simply go to the Help menu to bring up a searchable help document. This document covers all of ecto's features.

As mentioned in the Setup section, some users may not know how to handle the initial setup of ecto, particularly with respect to the blog's access point URLs. Information on these URLs is included in the built-in help documentation and on-line, but an in-line help reference of some sort would be more useful.

ecto has a very clean look, and will be very much at home with the rest of your Mac OS X applications. The program is responsive and stable, and is logically designed to make managing your remote weblogs as easy as possible. If you have an existing blog in a system like MovableType or Blogger, ecto is a great choice.

All of the contents of this site are copyright 2004 by Peter R. Wood, unless otherwise indicated. Email me if you have any questions.