I’ve been using Qumana, which is a free offline blog editor for Mac, but I’ve been told that the tagging kind of sucks. The thing is, I hate MarsEdit, which everyone else seems to love and which also costs like $30. Enter Ecto. It’s only $17.95, and I’m currently in the 21-day trial period to see if I like it.
So far, I like the simple interface and the fact that I can do things like adding bold and italic without having to code them myself. If there’s a way to do that in MarsEdit, it escaped me.
Bulleted lists are also
- Easy,
- Fast, and
- Code free
And block quotes seem to be
Easy as pie.
So far, so good.
I love that there are checkbox lists of both tags and categories, so it’s easy to find them and add them to my post. Ecto, I think I love you. Let’s see how I feel in a week or two.
What offline blog editor do you use, if any, and why? If you don’t use an offline blog editor, why not?
Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Kristen! I am glad you discovered and are enjoying Ecto. It’s currently better than MarsEdit at “WYSIWYG” type editing, which I can tell is important to you.
MarsEdit does have some built-in macros and can be customized to automatically insert a lot of the “code” that you are trying to avoid. E.g. pressing cmd-B in MarsEdit will wrap the selected text in the required strong tags.
At any rate, thanks for giving MarsEdit a try, and I’m glad you found something that is making you happy.
Daniel Jalkut
Red Sweater Software
Thanks for the comment, Daniel. You are dead on: I really like WYSIWYG, which is why I have been a Qumana fan so far and not so much with MarsEdit. But folks who love it are pretty vehement about it! So clearly you’re good at what you do. :)
Kristen
I don’t usually use an offline blog editor, because I’m familiar with HTML and can write code or find the right code to borrow. Sometimes, though, I’ll cheat and set up a table (for aligning stacks of photo thumbnails in a post) within Microsoft’s FrontPage web-site-editing software, then view the code, copy it, and paste it into a blog post.
I’ve been trying out ScribeFire. It’s got the wysiwyg, multi-blog support, save notes/drafts, and it’s embedded in Firefox as an addon (hit F8 to launch it quickly). So far so good.
http://www.scribefire.com/
I use Blog by Fahim Farook. It’s for Windows, though, so not something you could use by the sounds of it. And I’ll also add the usual disclaimer – Fahim is my husband (now) and we met and married because of Blog.
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