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More on offline blogging – Ecto vs. MarsEdit

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I’ve got a challenge coming up in March. Looks like I may end up traveling again, and this time I’m going to be fully-prepared for offline creation of blog entries. In preparation, I’m doing some serious researching of offline-blogging tools.

You know that I’ve used Flock to create a few entries, and just the other day I downloaded a trial version of ecto (USD $17.95 shareware) and have spent a few hours testing it.


Picture 3.pngI just ran across the tool I’m using at this moment, called MarsEdit. So let me make a few quick comparisons while creating this blog entry in MarsEdit.
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More on offline blogging – Ecto

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Ecto - for offline bloggers I’ve continued my experimental use of a couple of tools for offline blogging. My friends think I’m online all the time, I’m sure, but I find that there are long periods – sometimes as long as a couple of weeks – when Internet connectivity is quite difficult to obtain. And during those times, it seems, I am most prone to be writing up experiences or discoveries and making blog entries. So it becomes crucial that I be able to compose a blog entry, including photos or graphics, while I’m offline.

I already introduced you to Flock, which I’d call a “browser on steroids” since its core raison d’être is to browse the web, but Flock contains additional tools that include a blog-entry-creator that’s not too shabby. The Flock team calls it “The Social Web Browser” and they describe it this way… “Flock
is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.”

Now I’ve picked up an evaluation copy of ecto and have used it to create a few posts. And I like both the process and the tool.

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When is FREE Good Enough?

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You may not think about this too much, but the corporate I.T. folks think about it a lot and since I’ve been there before, I do too.

I’m not talking about death and taxes here.

It’s the “make vs buy” decision, but slightly camouflaged.

Most of my readers are not corporate I.T. geeks with lots of resources available to them. Right? Isn’t that your situation? You probably operate on a small budget, and you’re probably affiliated with a nonprofit, and your salary, much like your employer’s budget, is probably a bit slim. So any time you can get an online service free of charge, they’ve got your undivided attention. Well how do you make the decision to use a free tool when the functioning of your enterprise is going to rely upon it? [read on…]

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Offline blogging

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ryanne and jay selling out
Jim Sky

I couldn’t stand it any longer. When I was in India, attending the AirJaldi summit, on one of the days when the bandwidth diminished to a trickle (due to temporary technical difficulties), I just could not stand trying to create my blog entries thru that little mousehole of connectivity! It was SO frustrating! I vowed to myself at that time that I would look into offline blogging software at the earliest possible moment.

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Ryanne and Jay “Selling out”

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Which are you more concerned about – seizing an opportunity, or “selling out?”

ryanne and jay selling out
Ryanne (above) and Jay have
signed a deal with PodTech
and will blog on sustainable culture

Ryanne and Jay, who I met in Dharamsala, India, in October this year, and whose “hearts of gold” were so obvious from the beginning (they just stepped up and volunteered to help our students learn how to shoot and share video without hardly being asked), have just “sold” the rights to their video podcasts to PodTech. You can see that there was definitely some discussion about the commercialism of selling to a “channel” that carries advertising, and all that… [Read more…]