Glenn Wolsey, writer for Macguide Magazine and author of http://www.GlennWolsey.com expresses his views about the top applications for blogging on the Mac. – Thanks to Glenn for this guest post.
Blogging can be a hugely rewarding and satisfying hobby, or in some cases job. But it does have it’s tough times, especially when it comes to composing, publishing, and announcing your posts. Fortunately for those users on the Mac platform there are some great tools to streamline your blogging process – let’s take a look.
Step One. Collect News – NewsFire
NewsFire is one of the best looking application on the Mac in my opinion. My RSS reader of choice, NewsFire is one of David Wants many applications, and in my opinion, his best.
NewsFire’s layout is very simple and easy to use, which allows you to streamline your RSS reading process and flick through hundreds of feeds seamlessly.
Step Two. Compose – Ecto
Ecto is my most valuable blogging tool that I have, and it’s Darren Rowse’s too. Without this application blogging would take much longer, and be much harder. With all the small yet great features it will end up saving your hours of time, especially if you manage multiple blogs.
If you are not familiar with Ecto, it’s an application which allows you to compose blog posts locally, then save them as drafts to edit later. You can use Ecto while you offline so it’s a great way to store loads of material ready to post when your creative side doesn’t feel like coming outside.
Ecto also features some nice time saving features such as drag and drop image placement and uploading. While your editing your entry simply drag images from your machine into the text area, place them as you like, and when you hit publish the images will be uploaded to your server and placed just as you had them into your blog post.
For those lucky enough to be on an Intel Mac, there is a specific Intel build of Ecto you can download here.
Step Three. Resize Images – ImageShackle
When I’m blogging I like to include images in posts. They can be very handy to help explain steps I’m explaining to the reader, and they make the post much more appealing for the “scanner” type reader.
Image Shackle lets you resize an image quickly, and is the easiest way to make your photos the right size.
Step Four. Announce – Pukka and Pingoat
After you’ve written and published your blog post you need to get the word out. The first step is to go over to Pingoat.com and ping your blog, Pingoat will ping around 30 different sites from one universal location, saving you time from traveling to all the sites and pinging yourself.
Pukka is in my opinion the best tool to post to your del.icio.us account from OSX. Simply drag the URL of your post out of Safari (or your chosen web browser) onto the Pukka icon in the dock, add a title, description, and tags, and click done. Your link will be submitted to del.icio.us with a satisfying “ping” sound.
So there you have it, 5 Mac OSX application which will help you blog more quickly, more efficiently, and with more fun.
What blogging tools do you like to use? Let us know in the comments below.
Digg this Post
I like Vienna RSS because it opens a new tab with the complete article in those stupid ‘partial content’ RSS feeds.
For Images, Imagewell does the job for me. I do not use the Dashboard that much, and Imagewell allows resizing, borders, even watermarking.
For blogging, I like the Performancing extension for Firefox, and Ecto. FIreFTP is a nice extension for ‘Fox for easy FTP’ing without having to open a new program.
Best of all, they’re all free, save for ecto, but ecto’s worth it.
http://freewaremac.net
Instead of using these applications I use only one: FLOCK
This browser is integrated with del.icio.us, you can blog with it.
The only thing that I miss is the Ping feature, but ok. I can live without it.
I recently stumbled upon ProBlogger and have NOT been disappointed. You not only point bloggers of all levels in the right directions, but also bring new items to the forefront each and every time.
Much thanks to you for building such a useful community and sharing your experiences and expertise!
Windows? What’s that???
Awesome, if only all websites were made this way. Fast, simple and informative. Useful tools
[…] I was recently reading glennwosley.com and I came across an entry that hed written about blogging. I immediately dis-regarded it. But earlier today I remembered that in his entry he talked about Ecto, a blogging application. I thought it would be cool to try out, so I downloaded it from the website. I didn’t realize it until I downloaded it, but it integrates with WordPress (the software I use to run this site.) So I set it up and ran a couple tests, and man is it cool. You can view your entries, edit them, and write new ones in this app and all the changes will be made on the server. Another feature that I really like about it, is how it handles images. Before I found Ecto I would upload the image to WordPress and I would hope it fits in with the content on the page. But now with ecto, I can resize it if I want, move it around, and many other things. So far I really like Ecto. If you run a blog you should really think about trying it out. A copy of Ecto will put you down about $18 (I’m am still using trial.) If you want to try it out you can download it from there website. Posted by tucker on Dec 12 2006 under Cool Stuff, Games […]
[…] Su Problogger ho trovato un interessantissimo articolo scritto da Glenn Wolsey su quali sono gli che non dovrebbero mai mancare ad un blogger che utilizza Mac OS X. Siccome ritengo che possa essere molto utile per tutti coloro che sono alle prime armi con il blogging e visto il crescente numero di navigatori che scelgono tale forma di comunicazione per esprimere i loro pensieri e diffonderli nella rete ho deciso di tradurlo per tutti colo che hanno qualche difficoltà con l’inglese e qualche rigetto verso le traduzioni fuzzy di Google/Bablefish. […]
[…] 5 Essential OSX Blogging Tools (tags: osx software blogging) […]
[…] I Googled “best blog tools for Mac” and found this article by Darren Rowse, which recommended Newsfire for reading feeds and ecto for posting. Both look pretty good, though I’ve only played with them for a few minutes, so far. I used ecto for the Day 1 post, and seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. On the Windows side, I’ve been using Bloglines.com web-based feed reader. It’s not bad, but slow, like any web-based app. Of course, the cool thing is, I can access my feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. For posting from Windows, I’ve mostly used the WordPress web-based post editor. Same slowness, same universal availability as Bloglines.com feed reader. I played around with the Widows Live plug-in the Internet Explorer, but I don’t like the way it works. If you’re reading a web page that you want to link in a post, you click “Blog this” in the IE Live toolbar. Instead of just dropping a link into the body of a new post, it titles the post with linked page header and creates a link in the body in its own paragraph. I find myself deleting the title and changing the formating of the link. The WordPress editor is slower off the mark but quicker to the finish. But ecto blows them both away. […]
and if you track your stats with Google Analytics, you can do it a little easier with a dashboard widget – Dashalytics, http://dashalytics.rovingrob.com
[…] Wir alle tun es, aber womit tun wir das eigentlich? Welche kleinen Tools unterstützen uns bei der täglichen Bloggerei? Ein interessantes Thema, dass schon hier, hier oder auch hier behandelt wurde. Ich selbst arbeite an einem MacBook Pro, welches an einem 23“ Cinema Display hängt, wenn ich zu Hause bin. Als Software kommt folgendes zum Einsatz: Browsen und Bloggen: Firefox […]
[…] I found a super cool little OS Xwidget that will handle quick and dirty resizing needs (via Problogger via Lifehacker). It’s called Image Shackle: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashb…geshackle.html […]
I Second: MarsEdit and NetNewsWire! Awesome tools