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I have slowly been learning my around my new MacBook Pro, and in doing so, I’ve been searching for software and applications that allow me to do the same tasks that I was able to accomplish on a PC. Thus far, I’ve been able to find replacements that are as good, if not better than their PC counterparts. In this series, I’m going to attempt to outline my desktop setup and my software setup that I allows me to be my most productive while blogging.
As with most of you, the blogging platform is the most important part of your blog, in my case, that platform is Wordpress. Without our blogging platform, we’d have no blogs. There are 10’s if not hundreds of blogging platforms out there, it is more or less just a matter of choosing one that you like. I’ve chosen Wordpress for two primary reasons:
- Wordpress is a free software, and very powerful. It does what it says it does.
- Wordpress is community driven. This is probably the best feature because it means for hundreds of thousands of available themes and plugins, and the Wordpress platform itself is updated constantly.
Initially, my primary method of publishing posts to my blog was through the built in Wordpress web admin system, but as I became a more “seasoned blogger”, I began using local tools that would allow me to write and save posts to my local machine prior to publishing them to my blog. The first tool that I began using was on a PC, and it was offered by Microsoft – it was called Windows Live Writer. This tool was great and really introduced me to the idea of “offline blogging”. Since converting to a Mac, I’ve found a comparable software that makes offline blogging an absolute breeze. That program is called ecto and it is actually available for both Windows and OSX users.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:08 am
Me too was some time ago impressed with things I could do in Windows Live Writer. The thing I have loved the most was live preview of how post will actually look like on my blog. With time and some new versions I stopped appreciating it so much. I have always had problems as my native language is Slovene (Slovenia/EU) the check spell wasn’t supported. On the other hand I get the best check spell there is in my Firefox browser so this was a big + for posting directly in my wordpress.
I’m moving to iMac in some three weeks so this was the reason I come to your blog. Ecto looks promising. With the new wordpress 2.7 there will be even less reasons for me to use offline posting app.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:46 am
You may also want to check out ScribeFire for Firefox. That is, if you use Firefox. I am actually partial to Safari, but ScribeFire is a good extension and best of all, it is free.