Blogo is new blogging software for Mac OS X. I used it for a few minutes and I give it the thumbs down. I didn't like it for the following reasons:

1. Blogo didn't download my category list and give me a way that I could see to choose a category for my post. This by itself is an instant deal buster. I'm already out. Done. Kaput. And I'm a bit shocked this is missing, frankly.

2. Blogo is not WYSIWYG. It sort of is, but if you're dealing with a photo, then it inserts a little icon that represents the photo. This is frankly lame. I don't want a "Preview." I want to edit the actual post. I understand this is a hard problem to solve. But other people have solved it. If you want to be a player in this space, solve it, and solve it well. Get rid of the edit and preview metaphor. It sucks. It sucks big time.

3. Blogo posted a temporary post to my blog to get the styles of my blog to render an accurate preview. It then failed to delete the post. I had to log into my website and delete it manually. The problem with this is it will immediately get sucked up by feedburner and show up in people aggragators. This is really really lame. And it didn't tell me it was going to do this. If it did, I would have said, no fricking way you piece of poop. You lame piece of poop.

4. Editing in Blogo is freaking weird (and missing features like numbered lists). I had a picture in my post. I deleted the picture like fifty times just trying to delete a blank line above the picture in my post. Then I realized I had to drag down to the bottom of the post. WTHIAHB!? (What the hell in a hand basket?) Also really, really, REALLY lame. And frustrating. And just, well, silly. Why reinvent the wheel here? Try working like every other application on the planet, then we'll talk.

One of the biggest barriers in the way of me posting to my blog is convenience. It's got to be drop dead easy. Logging into a web page to post is way too painful. Also, it's way too easy to loose your post if something weird happens. Which happens way too frequently. This is why using a blog posting application is the way to go. First and foremost, you have support for drafts. Save often. Then come back to it.

I've recently switched my computer life back to Macintosh. One of the first things I did was look for the best tools for the stuff I do frequently, like post to my blog. Here's what I discovered.

Bottom line - Ecto is the program to use if you blog on Mac OS X. It has all the required features. WYSWYG editing. Support for all the blogging engines (even Das Blog, which I use). It also has some nice integration with Apple technologies like iTunes and iPhoto. It also has a Amazon.com feature that looks cool, but I haven't really used it yet. Ecto also has a plugin architecture. For example there are plugins for posting to twitter and flickr.

There are two items I'd like added to the Ecto toolbar - "insert picture" and "insert link". Ecto supports both of these fine, it's just a bit awkward to invoke these from the menus. I've spent too much time hunting around trying to find the UI to do this. Of course I can drag a picture into my post from the Finder, but this typically isn't how I want to do things. Ecto costs $17.95, which I gladly paid. I've been using Ecto for a while now, and it's never crashed, and I don't recall having any problems with it at all. This is a great track record.

I tried Mars Edit as well, and it looks like a fine program but it lacks WSYWYG editing which, for me, is a instant deal buster. And I understand HTML. I think this was be really painful for a less technical person to use. I will certainly look at Mars Edit again when it supports WSYWYG. I really like the Mars Edit icon though, so it has that going for it. Mars Edit costs $29.95, which I think is about twice as expensive as it should be.

As an aside, if you use Windows, there's no better tool than Windows Live Writer. This program is one of my favorite Microsoft applications ever. In fact before I found Ecto, I blogged with Windows Live Writer from Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. I think this is the gold standard for all blogging applications to judge themselves by. Oh and by the way, Windows Live Writer is free.

I'm having doubts about the FictionBlog (fictionblog.mikefullerton.com). While I've definitely been posting to the fiction blog, I'm not really getting much of a response in readership there. Maybe I'm just not pinging to the right places, or getting the word out into the intertubes about it, or maybe it'll just take more time.

In addition to the small readership, its kind of a pain having two blogs. Well, it was an experiment (so there's that). Either way, I plan to continue writing my fiction blog posts, but maybe they'd be okay within appropriate categories on my main blog. I worry that my blog has a bit of a identity crisis, but maybe that's ok since it's really about the things in my life that are important to me. Some of them anyway. And people can skip over the posts that they aren't interested in. I do this all the time when I visit blogs.

What do you folks think? If you wouldn't mind, would you please leave a comment and let me know what your thoughts are? I'd appreciate it. Also feel free to say why you didn't go read the fictionblog if you'd like - this would be interesting information for me. Only about two or three of you made the trek over to it.

thanks

I started a new, additional, blog: Mike's FictionBlog. I'll talk about books, movies, writing, etc.. If you're interested in any of these, check it out. Those of you who know me know I read a lot, and this seemed like a very obvious thing to do. Please check it out: http://fictionblog.mikefullerton.com

I may also be dividing my current blog into another blog or two. This is because I think my blog to date has had a bit of an identity crisis. I think I tend to not post to it because I'm not sure what it's about. What is the point? I don't mean that in a depressed futile way, but in a literal way. What am I trying to say with it? What is the content supposed to be? Who am I trying to have read it? I think my friends and family read it and that's about it. I'd like to do more with it.

There are a few categories that I'd like to focus on:
1. Books and reading and other Fiction related topics
2. Photography
3. Technology
4. My life in general

I'm thinking about combining 2 + 3 into another blog. Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do. I see advantages and disadvantages to combining these. But on the other hand, I don't want too many of these damn things. I'm open to suggestions.

This, of course, implies that I'll be spending more time blogging. True. Which is something I want to do anyway. This way I'm hoping to cultivate more readers because the readers can choose which blog is interesting, and each blog will be tightly focused. We'll see. Let me know what you think. Hopefully this isn't a stupid idea.

So I updated my blog to DasBlog version 1.9 and changed my RSS feed to use feedburner. Feedburner might cause your aggregator to mark all my posts as unread. If so, sorry about that.

So far so good with the upgrade. Upgrading DasBlog is a pain in the rear though. Took me a while to get everything working.

Sometimes I write these posts and click the submit button and then.... nuthin.. I got nuthin... I know people are reading but a comment here or there wouldn't crash my server, if you know what I'm saying. If not, I'm happy you're here reading!