chewy

I’ve been looking for a decent blog publishing tool, but every time I think about it I realize that nothing is likely to be as easy to use as the FriendFeed bookmarklet. I’m completely in love with the FriendFeed bookmarklet and it’s super simple way to add media to your comments. I wish posting to my blog were as simple!

I used to use MarsEdit (back when it was owned by the NetNewsWire guy), but now that it has been acquired and upped to version 2.0 without adding an real new features, I feel a bit raw about it all. Especially considering the 1.0 version is nowhere to be found to download, meaning my purchase is effectively wasted.

So now I’m trying out Ecto. So far it seems pretty good, but the big question will be how easy is it to insert links and pictures in to my posts. We’re about to find out:

Check out Ecto! It apparently has good support for linking to Amazon products too:

“Planet Earth – The Complete BBC Series [HD DVD]” (BBC Warner)

(Btw – I am totally waiting for the HD-DVD version of this to drop in price. I figure it has to soon, considering HD-DVD is dead)

But Ecto also claims to be able to support good media, including resizing. Let’s see how that goes. Here’s my dog:

Well that didn’t go so well. Lame. Two problems:

• Ecto didn’t resize/downsize the image, which was from my iPhoto library and fairly large.
• It did automate uploading to the blog, but if it doesn’t actually insert the photo in my post that’s kind of pointless! Instead I just got a stupid link. Bummer.
  

Let’s try dragging an image in to the editor:

Wow, dragging worked way better. It gave me options to create a thumbnail, resize, downsize the quality, etc. I wonder why I wasn’t given these options when I pressed the import media button. Don’t know which button I’m talking about? Here, I’ll paste in a screen cap of that button to see if screen grabs are easy to do:

Wow, that seems to work well too. So far Ecto is impressing me, though I wish the import media worked a bit better, but the drag and drop and pasting of images has worked really well, so I can’t complain too much.

Now for the final test: let’s upload it and see how it ultimately looks in my blog.

UPDATE: I’m modifying this post to correctly link to my dog, Chewy, mostly to figure out how to display my iPhoto pictures, but also because Chewy is rad. Here’s another cute dog, but not mine (found him via the Ecto Flickr integration, which is also rad):