Ecto - Test post
Seeing that me and Thea will be spending a lot of time traveling Europe next month I bought myself a shiny new MacBook Pro last week and I've been settling in and getting used to working on OS X the past couple of days :) (A full post on this later). One of the things I was looking for was a blogging tool to replace Windows Live Writer, I settled on
Ecto which seemed to be the standard for offline weblog editing on Mac. (It's also got a Windows version)
After giving it a couple of tries it always hung on retrieving weblogs and despite seeing CPU activity for that process in the Activity Monitor the application never seemed to get anywhere until I eventually killed it. At first glance I suspected something fishy with the Metablog API implementation in Community Server but didn't get another chance to look at it until this evening.
Firing up
Wireshark (Ethereal) it turns out that when Ecto is retrieving the list of blogs available to your user it also opens every individual blog and downloads all the posts for that blog as well. Since my user has administrative access to dotnet.org.za that meant it opening and downloading posts and categories for 500 blogs which explains the long delay :( While this is probably not a common scenario some form of process indicator would've been welcome. Letting it run its course it eventually finished and if you see this I'm finally able to publish posts to my blog again.
Apart from this Ecto seems to be packed with pretty much every other feature I need for editing, publishing and managing blog posts. It's not free ($17.95) but a downloadable trial is available.