I’m playing with a couple of different offline post editors this week. One is called Ecto and the other called ScribeFire. They both pretty much do the same thing, which is they let you compose your posts without using the online posting mechanism your blogging software comes with, including all the bells and whistles of inserting links, images, tags, etc., then they automatically log into your blogging control panel and post the entries for you. The primary advantage is that you don’t need to be connected to the Internet to write and format your posts — not extremely necessary if you’re in front of a computer with a 24/7 connection to the Internet, but could be handy for laptop users. I also installed a WordPress plugin called FCKEditor, which adds lots of formatting options directly to the WordPress posting screen. 

(If you haven’t guessed, I’m not entirely taken with the built-in mechanism and am interested in alternative ways of composing, formatting and posting to my blogs.)

The only substantive difference between the three is that one (Ecto) is a stand-alone application, one (ScribeFire) runs as a Firefox add-on, and one is a plugin for the blogging software itself. Without having done much more than to install them so far, I’m leaning toward FCKEditor because I almost always post “live” from my desktop computer. I’m least likely to stick with Ecto because it costs $17.95 for a permanent license, while the other two are free. I can see a middle path of using FCKEditor and ScribeFire so that I could blog offline when necessary.

If any of you passing through are WordPress users and have an opinion, I’d be glad to hear your reviews. If you use WordPress and are thinking about this sort of thing yourself (it has come up a couple of times on AskMetaFilter in the last few days, for example), I’ll post a comment or an update to this in a week or two and let you know what worked and didn’t.