I wasn’t following the recent development of ecto but it seems version 3 beta is now out (actually since October ;-). So I give it a try with this blog post. And as I am on it here is my personal wishlist for a great blog editor:
- have a WYSIWYG modehave easy flickr integration with multiple accounts and to choose the right size (I like medium)
- have del.icio.us (etc.) integration for easily adding links
- provide a way to add (or even manage) categories
- have good technorati tag integration. I personally have a lot of tags so a tag list like in ecto or MarsEdit does make me not happy as it’s simply too big. I’d rather like a simple text line like in Flock or ScribeFire.
- be cross platform
- let me post drafts to the blog so I can edit them later or set them up for timed publication. Or let me directly set the time for publication
- let me define tags and hotkeys for them (e.g. I like <h3> better then <b> for headlines as it’s what should be used)
- have automated photo upload (and resizing) to the blog. Let me add everything offline and then automatically upload everything needed for that blogpost.
- Support for other media like audio or video and the most popular video sites (I’d love to have blip.tv available).
- Written in Python and open source (of course very personal choice here ;-) )
This is just what came to my mind quickly. Feel free to add your wishes.
And I just copied my draft from ecto over to the Flock editor as I couldn’t put my lines I wrote down above into a list by selecting it and clicking the icon. The following is also true for ecto:
- It has a WYSIWYG mode.
- It has not flickr integration except uploading photos to flickr (haven’t tested it). But it has media management via iPhoto/iMovie/iTunes and an Amazon helper.
- you can add new categories
- tag editing is done via a list (a very long list for me where I never find stuff again)
- It is cross platform but closed source (actually shareware)
- I can adjust publishing times
- It has a mechanism for defining custom tags and adding hotkeys as well as buttons to them (great!)
- I guess it can also do automated image upload but not sure
- It has no integration for other audio/video sites except iTunes/iMovie
- But it is extensible via AppleScript but not sure how much and if you really theoretically could do all that stuff with it.