As I mentioned the other day, I have started to use Windows Live Writer and can tentatively say that I am a convert. After spending my hard earned on a blog editor for mac some while back after hearing many endorsements for ecto you’d think Id be set up on that side of things too.
But no, ecto has, unfortunately not been the easiest blog editor, reviews on the other famous mac blog editor mars edit are mixed and so now I am trying Qumana. I can tell already that it is not as an enjoyable interface as Windows Live Writer (can you even believe those words are coming out of my preverbial mouth!) but the set up was as automated which takes most of the pain out of the equation, so watch this space, I’ll let you know how I get along with it.
UPDATE: Qumana crashed when I tried to publish it. strike1.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Andy // Jun 18, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Thanks for the heads up – been having a few Ecto issues since going to the beta of v3, so thought I’d give it a try.
As you say, set-up is a snip, but I can’t see how I can get it to use multiple fields (summary, link, MP3 etc) to map to my blog fields, like Ecto does.
Do you know if it does that, by any chance, and if so, how you get it to do it, cos I’d like to give it a proper run out as it looks pretty neat?
2 Tom Allen // Jun 19, 2008 at 12:05 am
I was an experienced Live Writer user on my PCs and then spent ages checking out Mac blog editors – Qumana never ever ran stable for any period of time despite various upgrades, Mars was a poor interface and none too stable, and in the end after three or so visits and changes of mind I have ended up with Ecto which does what it says on the tin and is stable – the only problem is that its interface is “different” from Live Writer which must be the best Blog editor apart from speed. So peservere with learning Ecto would be my advice
3 Liam // Jun 19, 2008 at 3:33 pm
@Andy: My main issue with Ecto is that I couldn’t get images to align properly without going into the html, which I didn’t want to have to do. Not sure about the options you mentioned on Qumana, Ill let you know if I work it out.
@Tom: Now Ive made the switch I might use Qumana a bit longer, it only died once on me, and I didnt loose the post, so for that it is partially forgiven. I have tried to get on with ecto 3 or 4 times now and never with much luck, but if Qumana crashes a lot Ill be forced to revert.
Thanks for your comments guys, good to get some insight.
4 Andy // Jun 24, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Liam – re your images issue…
You can set the floats and borders in the upload settings in Ecto – and if you have a div class set in your stylesheet for images, you can make life even easier by just setting that class in the relevant preference. Works pretty well for me.
If you had a float left, you just tell it, in my case, class=”imageLeft”, and if it’s right, just type class=”imageRight”, and hit upload, and job done.
Don’t know if that helps.