I’ve heard good things about PC/Mac clients for writing blog posts, so thought I would give it a go. I tried out ecto for OS X, to published to my WordPress based blog.

It did what was promised it acted as a WYSIWYG blog composition tool, and in that sense it was easy to use and worked without problems. However I few things:

• I could only attach (as far as I could see) audio, pictures and movies. I wanted to attached a txt file, (and may want to upload PDF/doc files) but could see no way of doing this.
• I couldn’t send it to the blog as an unpublished draft, so I couldn’t send it to WordPress and then upload/link-to the text file using the wordpress interface before publishing.
• Ecto is a generic blog tool, not specific to WordPress. While in many ways a good thing, it does have it’s downside, there are some options on the WordPress composition screen that I rarely use but do find them useful occasionally, and felt it somewhat unsettling for them not to be there should I need them.
• As a plus: the problem with the WordPress interface is that there is a lot of screen space used with the top of the screen menus and other misc stuff, and the edit space is somewhat small, and it is annoying to need to scroll both the screen and the text box. the ecto UI does not have this issue. But then WordPress 2.7 may address this problem.
• One of the main plus points is being able to carry on editing offline, but with Google Gears you should be able to edit happily offline (I haven’t tried this yet).

So ecto is certainly worthy trying if you are after a OS X based blog client, and I chose it above others available based on reviews I had read, but for me, I think I will stick with the native web interface for the time being.

(posted using Ecto)