Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Blogging with ecto


Mark Hinkle has been exploring Flock (Mac OS X) for use with the forth-coming Zenoss blogs, and that reminded me of a brief conversation with radix about a year ago where we were discussing blog editors. Thus re-motivated, I did a little research and evaluation of blog editing/posting software. The one that seems to be the most complete and featureful (to me) is ecto. Getting it set up with the new blogger seems a little awkward (the default "access point" doesn't work), but there's another version in the works where the kinks will be worked out (or be moot).



Here's what I had to do to get it (version 2.4.1 Universal + blogger beta support) to work with the new blogger API:


  • Hit the "Add Account" button on the Accounts window
  • Give my blog URL, as requested
  • Set the System as "Blogger"
  • Set the API as "Atom"
  • Set the Access Point as http://www.blogger.com/feeds/default/blogs
  • Be sure that all the RSS feeds are "full" (blog settings in Blogger admin UI)

ecto was then able to get a list of my blogs for various account names as well as recent entries for each one.



One problem I have run into, however, is the multiple accounts thing. I have to quit ecto and restart it in order to post to blogger under a different user name. It seems to be caching login info and not using the user name and password that the particular account is configured with.



Despite that minor inconvenience, I will probably purchase the full version of this software and begin using it extensively. The single driving motivation for this is the multiple account management feature: seeing all the accounts and blogs I have within one application acts as a reminder; I will be more likely to post to my other blogs now :-)


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1 comment:

Ryan said...

Thank you. Your access point info fixed my problem with Ecto not talking with Blogger. Thanks.