D.I.Y.

ONLINE

USING ECTO FOR ALMOST

AUTOMATIC BLOGGING

An easy-to-use application to manage routine and time-consuming weblog chores.

By Mark Frauenfelder

To be a blogger is to know the drudgery of entering countless HTML tags by hand, as well as resizing and uploading images. The two most popular blogging applications, Blogger ( blogger.com) and Movable Type ( movabletype.org) only go so far in automating the grunt work that goes into posting an entry to your weblog.

I use Movable Type to maintain the blog I coedit, boingboing.net. There are many wonderful things about the application, including its powerful archiving, search, and discussion features, but I found it to be lacking in the area I was most interested in: posting entries. I hated having to

type <a href=” http://example.com”>Link</a> for every post I wrote, and I especially hated having to open up Adobe Photoshop to resize photographs that I wanted to include in an entry. I would often make a typo in an HTML tag, and the entire page would render in italics or the color red.

A couple of weeks after I started using Movable Type, I read another blogger’s wild praise for an application with the funny-sounding name of Ecto. This program, enthused the blogger, automated all the

Ecto’s powerful blogging features make up for Movable Type’s weak editing tools.

Make: 147