Ecto 3 now in beta
I’ve been using Ecto as my blog writer for some time. It is a great desktop blog writing client for the Mac that works flawlessly with most platforms, including WordPress and Drupal. When I saw there was an update in beta I got excited.
As with all things beta the download from the main Ecto site came with plenty of warnings and caveats. Knowing I might be taking down months of blogging in one fell swoop, I took the plunge and downloaded Ecto 3. (It’s kind of a rush to leap in and be an early adopter of a beta, really, in light of the many issues these betas can cause.)
Happily, Ecto 3 installed with no issues to the machine (a plus – I’ve had many crashes over the months I’ve been writing about social media, software, betas and start ups in general). Getting off on the right foot was key, but could Infinite Sushi, the creator of Ecto, Endo and Flickr1000, keep it up?
It was time to add each of my many blogs and sync them to Ecto, grabbing my posts from the server and making sure I could post new ones. This is where I hit my first snag. What was an incredibly painless process in previous incarnations of Ecto was a drawn out, time consuming mess in Ecto 3 beta.
I ended up losing the ability to back up my posts using Ecto, something that made me angry. Theoretically, you can import as many posts from each blog as you want. I tried importing 1200 at a time (yes, I’ve been blogging for eons) and it completely crashed Ecto 3 and my machine. I tried it on several blogs, thinking it might be one of the servers they are one and still had no luck.
I started decreasing the number of posts called and trying again and again. Hours later I was able to force a sync up to 500 posts on three blogs, with the rest topping out at 100. Not cool, Ecto! That is something that is high on my list of things I want to see fixed when this comes out of beta.
Aside from the glitch in setting up blogs initially, Ecto 3 is much feature rich than its preceding versions and has a much nicer overall user interface. In appearance, it has certainly grown up and gotten serious.
As for the features it ow integrates easily with Flickr, something that was a third party plug in only in previous versions. It also has some nice Amazon modules, an accurate word counter that is handy for the pro blogger, a way to create summaries, add keywords, fully manage categories including adding and removing them, manage trackback URLs, import multi media, add tags and more. The tags even use the Technorati specs so they pull your blog more fully into Technorati.
Overall I give Ecto 3 beta two thumbs up. If the creators of Ecto can fix the import glitch at the initial account set up for each blog it will go a long way. On a more personal note I’d like to see them add integration for FoxyTunes’s “now listening” feature and/or last.fm and MOG for those of us that also blog about music.
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August 10th, 2008
hi Leslie,
Thanks for the review of ecto 3. We’ll take a look at the issue you mention in your post.
Kind regards,
/gary