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.
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.
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