Relooking Blogging and Social Network Tools

After the move to WordPress, I need to reevaluate my blogging tools. Ecto version 3 is still okay as a desktop blogging client but doesn’t access all the capabilities of WP (though I don’t know if that’s possible with WP plugins). I don’t like the way Categories and Tags are “linked.” If I select a Tag, a category with the same name automatically gets checked. I’m still organizing posts with categories and tags so this “feature” doesn’t help clean up things. Where’d Technorati tags go? Why won’t my accept trackbacks setting stick?

This post is generated with MarsEdit which I like to use for Movable Type blogs. MarsEdit has always been bare-boned, shying away from WYSIWYG functionality and instead focusing on HTML editing and markup. In many ways, this is probably the best way to go, but sometimes, you want easy ways of doing things (like making ordered or unordered lists).

Recently, I heard about another Mac-based blogging client called Blogo. Mashable calls Blogo bad ass so I figured I’d try it out. Blogo is actually not that bad though its interface feels more like an over-glorified widget vice a real desktop app. With Blogo, not only can you author blog posts, but you can use it as a Twitter client as well. I do like how Blogo handles Categories and Tags. Categories are prepended with a # so you know #passion is a Category and blogging is a tag.

Including images with any of the above mentioned blogging clients has always been tough. I’ve found that it’s usually best to use the native web interface to add images. By working in HTML, you have better control of getting what you want. Ecto, MarsEdit, and Blogo all have mechanisms of incorporating images to blog posts, but the results vary greatly.

And speaking of Twitter, I bought Tweetie, a Twitter client for the iPhone. Tweetie has some awesome features like picture integration with Twitpic and location awareness. But I don’t really care for the iChat-like interface, much preferring the simple and clean interface of Twitterrific. Even with the crowded interface, the features are too much to ignore.