Flippin' ecto!
I've heard good things about some blogging software called ecto and decided to try it out today. Installing it was a bit of a pain, it turned out I needed some files that were included in a full Movable Type 3.x install but not included in an MT 2.661 upgrade install. I ended up in the ecto support forums where with some very prompt help from the author managed to get it working.
I've now been playing with the software for a couple of hours and, essentially, I love it. There are a few areas where it it still manages to outfox me, most of them are to do with ecto's WYSIWYG Rich Text editing interface. There is also a plain HTML interface, which is mainly what I've been using. Even though the entries in plain HTML look the same as they do in the Movable Type entry screen, ecto's interface is infinitely better, largely because of the vast speed increase the whole blogging procedure undergoes.
Other highlights have been ecto's clever HTML tag shortcuts For instance you can copy a destination URL into the clipboard, switch to ecto and highlight the phrase to be hyperlinked, press command-shift-U and hey presto you have a hyperlinked phrase. Simpler stuff like command-I and command-B work as well (this sounds like nothing, wait until you've have typed <i> and </i> a few hundred times). Also worth a mention is the highly illuminating graphical breakdown of the program in the ecto support forums.
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