Just for the record, I’ve completely abandoned Ecto and have adopted (and paid for) MarsEdit. I’ve still not heard back from the Ecto developer who wanted to know what problems I was seeing; and on the other hand MarsEdit has been performing flawlessly, and has become a sort of faithful companion.
So happens I’m off on a business trip this week, to the wilds of New Mexico, where they make sopapillas! I ought not be eating sopapillas on my diet, but you can’t get them here, and I haven’t had one since a brief sojourn in Santa Fé eight years ago. I intend to indulge.
Business trips being what they are, blogging will be pretty much non-existent here through the end of the week, the more so as I will be trying to continue working through one chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae per day over at Blogging Aquinas. Hope to see you there.
I’ve been using MarsEdit daily since I first wrote about it last week, and I have to say it’s working for me. It’s been absolutely bullet-proof, with no unpleasant surprises at all.
That post did get a comment from one of the Ecto maintainers, asking me to e-mail him so that we could talk about the problems I’m having with Ecto; I sent him an extensive e-mail about the specific problems I’m having with the latest version, and have not yet heard back.
I’m trying some new blogging software, a package called MarsEdit. For a long time now I’ve been moving back and forth between the built-in WordPress interface and a Mac app called Ecto. I like Ecto; it gives me a WYSIWYG view of the post, and lets me edit and save a local copy of the post. But it’s buggy. The WYSIWYG editor has some annoying quirks; and every once in a while the app simply shuts down, usually when I’ve asked it to post a draft to the weblog. If I had previously saved a local copy of the post, that’s only annoying; but usually I discover that I had neglected to do so.
Since the most important thing I want from using a standalone blog client is reliability (keeping all of my drafts on the server scares me), this means that Ecto is, for all its nice features, less useful than the WordPress web interface. So yesterday I went looking for other possibilities, and the only one that really looked like it might do is the aforementioned MarsEdit.
On the face of it, MarsEdit is very similar to Ecto, but lacks a few features. It doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing; you edit in HTML. On the other hand, that also means it doesn’t have Ecto’s weird editing quirks, and I’m pretty comfortable with HTML. Also, it doesn’t have Ecto’s “Amazon” tool, which makes it really easy to create nice links to book pages on Amazon’s web site, a feature I only started using a week or so ago. It does have a reasonably nice “Preview” feature, though; and it has nice HTML editing, with syntax-highlighting and customizable key commands; and so far it’s been rock solid.
I’ve already paid for Ecto; and the latest Beta (though still buggy and quirker) is much nicer than the previous version I’d been using. MarsEdit is more expensive (about $30). I’m going to continue to use it through the 30-day trial period, and then we’ll see.
So now you know why I’ve not been blogging all that much over the past year; there’s just been a bunch of stuff in my head that I wasn’t ready to broadcast. The “Watching the Tiber Go By” series wasn’t nearly all of it; there are lots of books I’ve read that I might want to comment on, and lots of related things I’ve been thinking that I might want to write about.
So what should readers expect to see in this space in the future? Good grief, I dunno. More of the sort of thing I’ve been writing for the last N years, I expect, with likely more content related to matters of faith. There will be book reviews, and all manner of foolishness, quite likely. And with any luck, I’ll be posting more frequently as well.
I’m off on a business trip at “O-dark-thirty” tomorrow morning, and won’t be back until the end of the week. I might blog something between now and then, but probably not. I just wanted to assure everyone that I’m not going to gone for another six months.
Hmmm. My last post was in May, and it’s now the end of July. ‘Twasn’t my intent to remain silent for so long, but I’ve been travelling a lot on business, and we went on vacation, and, well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’m beginning to feel like it’s time to get back in harness again, though perhaps somewhat differently than before. For over ten years, I reviewed virtually every book I read, often in some detail. I’m not sure I want to do that, anymore; but on the other hand I’ve been reading an awful lot, and sometimes I find that there are things I’d like to say. We’ll see how it goes.
Sorry about the lack of posting recently; first I had a bad cold that lasted for a couple of weeks, during the second of which I was going to work anyway and lapsing into a solitary torpor during the evenings. (”Solitary torpor” is the state of being too braindead for anything but computer solitaire.) Just as I was getting through that I fell into a serious case of Photoshop. Then my eldest got his tonsils and adenoids out; and he’s been having a rocky recovery (though I think he’s through the worst of it). What with the pain and worry, I’ve again been settling into a solitary torpor during the evenings. This may last for a few more days; but then I’m due to go on a business trip. So it may be into February before things wake up around here again.
So I just upgraded WordPress; my webhost has a neat one-click solution for that. Unfortunately, I have almost no memory of how I set up WordPress to look the way it did; and no desire to muck around with whenever I upgrade. So I’ve picked a theme that’s somewhat similar to what I had before, and that’s what I’m going to use.
Jane and I seem to be having trouble getting our e-mail at the moment, so if you’ve sent me some and I’ve not responded that’s probably why. We’re looking into the reasons why. If you need to get a hold of me urgently, leave a comment here.
Update: Apparently Earthlink’s blacklisted my web hosting service’s e-mail servers for no particularly good reason. Dreamhost is working on it.
Update: Mail is flowing again, one way or another. The thing with Earthlink still isn’t resolved, but we haff ways of getting your messages anyway. 