Office Lady or High school girl?
One of the things I find it difficult to do on a Mac or on OSX itself is blogging.
No, it’s not that I started to dislike blogging or find it a chore, but having used Windows Live Writer (first introduced to me by icie) for almost 3/4 of my blogging life, it’s hard to find an alternative to it.
While WordPress has it’s own built in blog composition tool, I find that it is much more useful for blogs that are more text heavy, which mine, is more of the image heavy side. Watermarking, uploading followed by inserting photos into each post is pretty much a pain in the butt and time wasting which could have been spent on finding for more moe pictures.
Windows Live Writer (WLW) is probably one of the better products by Microsoft of the late I would say (Surprisingly) . It’s a really fantastic piece of tool for offline blogging. That is creating and managing a blog without having to use your web browser nor having to need to be connected to the internets till you are really to upload your post.
The alternative of WLW on OS X is most probably Ecto, a Mac blog composition tool. I haven’t really used Ecto, but taking a look at it’s differences with Live Writer, I still prefer WLW.
Ecto
Ecto has some pretty handy features, one being the ability to use iPhoto and iTunes in synchronization with it. Meaning you can add in your iPhoto galleries and then resize it in the properties windows. You can also style the photos by specifying the margin and padding of the photo’s position. Pretty handy but not really applicable for me, and I don’t use iPhoto to organize my photos ^^;
Looking through previous posts (post browser) in ecto is easier compared to Windows Live Writer as it is done email style (Post ID, title and the timestamp), while WLW shows a small excerpt and title of the post, though handy, is rather frustrating to navigate through as the fonts of the title and excerpt are the same. ORZ
Another amazing feature in Ecto is the support for Amazon Associates Program links which allows you to publish posts with Amazon Associate links. Tad handy if you’re using the Amazon’s Associate program. I should try this sometime ^^;
Windows Live Writer
I generally prefer both ^^;
Windows Live Writer, has more image manupilation capabilites as compared to Ecto in my opinion. First of all, the ability to upload your embedded photos/moe pictures to an FTP server (if you have one) and also allowing image watermarking (which is a huge time saver) when I need to watermark my images.
WLW also has a simpler interface as compared to Ecto in my opinion, as most of the “Insert into post” tools are located at the right-hand corner, allowing faster interaction and blogging micro-management.
Conclusion
While Ecto has some pretty handy features, I still prefer WLW as stated at the start of my post. Reasons might be that WLW is much more user-friendly in my opinion, and the image manipulation is really a time saver as you can concentrate more on delivering the content to the readers instead of preparing it.
Another reason is that WLW is free while you are entitled to a 21-days trial for Ecto, before having to fork out US$17.95 (or S$26.40), which I find pretty ridiculous.
Too bad I have to run WLW via Parallels. Not too bad anyway as I get to test out some eroge.. And oh, this post has been written using WLW ^^;
What kind of blogging tools do you use?
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I tried Windows Live Writer after you introduced it to me, but I find that it takes a long time to upload posts that have a whole lot of images. Also, what happens if the connection is suddenly lost when the post is being uploaded? I never used it for long (1 post only, I think), so I don’t know.
I’ve just started out blogging. I’m not sure if blogging is for me when I tend to edit my writing often, for clarification, or out of feeling the need to justify whatever angst or negative bias I may have.
Anyhow, I decided against trying out WordPress for now because it looks like overkill. I just write within Chyrp with markdown syntax for easy formatting. I manually upload my media and execute my own scripts for thumbnail generation and watermarking. I might muster the energy to learn more about Chyrp at the code level and maybe make a proper module or two for content management in the process, for easier blogging.
I’m currently using blogger (which I heard a lot of people do not like LOL) but as with some of my other web based blogs (more personal, kinda hidden ones) what I do with images is after uploading I select the image copy and paste into my blog entry ^^; (found out by accident I could do that :P)
Dont you still have a PC? I mean, if I were “switching” to Mac, I’d still have a PC around the place. In that case, I’d just outsource blog posting to the PC (just like how I currently outsource image processing to my laptop).
BTW, apparently there is a new beta of live writer out with various new functionality. I might try it out some time on a test rig.
double: yeah it does take some time for image-heavy posts and sometimes its a bit buggy with the image links. Also, if connection is lost of timed out, it will tell you (eventually). In which case you just press the post button again (and again, and again…) until it posts. Overall though, there aren’t too many problems.
hmm never used those tools, but I enjoy blogging more on Mac, I always switch back to mac from bootcamp for blogging, the fonts are clearer ^^;
I use textwrangler to write my post, it’s something like notepad tho heh, nothing fancy :p
remember the old words: real programmers use notepad to code :p
I currently have no need to use blogging tools, since the only blog I actively maintain is a livejournal read by RL friends. Half of it’s just rambling so I don’t have to worry about making everything look super-presentable. ^^
I use the built-in WYSWYG editor in WP asI got so used to using it. Though I typed up post in pure HTML back in the early days.
I’m more interested about where those two sets of girls are from
Hmm…trying it out now…tell you soon after I tried it…hehe
Man, office lady for the win. =D
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