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.