Did you finish grade school or are you just another illiterate ghetto punk?
No, I’m not talking to you. That first sentence is a comment from one reader to another on a local news site. It’s an example of “internet muscles.” You know what I’m talking about – the attitude and language of some people, when they speak to someone online in a manner quite different from how they’d act if they met that person face to face. Read more
September 27, 2011: I’ve reconsidered the decision that I made in this post. Check out my update, where I explain why I’ve now switched to MarsEdit.
The hardest part of making the switch from Windows to Mac is often on the software side of things. While there are many great OS X apps, sometimes it can be hard to find the perfect replacement for an app that you’ve used on Windows. Since I’m not dual booting or running virtualization on my MacBook Air, I ran into that issue when searching for a replacement for Windows Live Writer. Cast whatever stones you want at Microsoft for other reasons, but Live Writer is an excellent blogging app. My search for a replacement for Live Writer focused on three choices: Blogo, MarsEdit, and ecto.
All three apps offer a fully functional trial version, so you can try out each and decide which one you prefer. You should do that, as there’s no right or wrong answer here. Each app has strengths and weaknesses, so your choice will come down to your workflow and your personal preferences. Don’t expect any of them to be as easy to use as Live Writer, though, as none of the apps offer an easy way to import your theme for WYSIWYG editing, as with Live Writer.
What I was looking for was an app that handled images easily (especially padding between the image and the text), something that integrated well with WordPress, and something that just let me write. I know that some of you are coders, and like handcrafting each post, with minute control. Not me. I just want to write, without thinking about HTML.
When I first started, I thought that Blogo would be my choice. It has the most attractive interface of the three, and is also the most simple. That simplicity can be good, but also comes at a price. Unlike MarsEdit and ecto, Blogo just doesn’t give you as many options to tweak to your liking. If Blogo works for you out of the box, great. If it doesn’t, you’re kind of stuck.
Blogo’s image handling is as simple as the rest of the interface. You drag an image (I did it from LittleSnapper, but you can do it from Finder as well) into a post, and then specify the image size. Short of editing the HTML of your post, there are no other options readily available to tweak an image, such as adjusting padding and margins.
Blogo’s other functions are basic, with buttons to bold, italicize, underline, or strikeout text, and to block quote text, create a list, and insert a link. You can also select your blog’s categories from a dropdown list. From the interface, you can publish a post to your blog (immediately, or scheduled for a future date), send a draft to your blog, or preview the post. The preview functionality is quite good, giving you a look at what the post would look like on your site. It’s a shame that this look couldn’t be carried over to the editing interface, like Live Writer’s WYSIWYG mode.
Blogo’s simplicity initially appealed to me, but over time I found too many limitations. I wanted more control over images, and, worse yet, I encountered a few bugs. On one occassion, I couldn’t get my cursor back to the Title box to edit the tile. Also, I’ve found that toggling between Rich Text mode, and back again, would add white space between paragraphs. Worse, this switching between modes inserted HTML code into my posts.
Blogo was an attractive, simple blogging app, but it left me wanting more. It can be purchased for $25.
While using Blogo, I also was using MarsEdit. MarsEdit isn’t as simple as Blogo, but provides more options. MarsEdit has a dropdown formatting menu, that allows you to easily format your text. The image editing options are as basic as Blogo’s, and pale in comparision to what is found in Live Writer. You can set image size and alignment, but can’t do much more than that. As of this writing, I still haven’t found a way to edit an image once it is inserted into a post (short of editing the HTML, or deleting and reinserting the image). This is such basic functionality, that I may just be missing it.
MarsEdit allows you to easily select post categories from your blog, and to input tags. While MarEdit retrieves your category list from you blog (or, at least it did with my WordPress blog), it does not do so with tags. This means that you have to recall your tags from your own memory, assuming you want to be consistent with your tags on your site.
MarsEdit has a nice Server Options interface, where you can use a dropdown menu to set a post’s status as published or draft. I preferred this over the interfaces in Blogo and ecto, where I sometimes held my breath clicking a button, not sure if I was unwittingly sending an unfinished post to 40Tech.
MarsEdit is a well-rounded app, and a strong choice for someone who likes to tweak options. Ultimately, though, I wasn’t happy with the image handling options, and how MarsEdit handles tags. If MarEdit suits you needs, you can purchase it for $39.95.
The third and final app that I tested was ecto. ecto is closer to MarsEdit than it is to Blogo. As with MarsEdit and Blogo, you can select categories from a list, but you also can select your blog’s tags from a list as well (at least on a WordPress blog you can). This gave ecto a leg up on the competition.
The expected text formatting options, such as bold, italics, and text justification, are present in a smaller toolbar in the editing window. One selection that isn’t present is the ability to designate a heading for text. For example, the word “ecto” at the start of this section of the article uses heading 4, which is set by a tag in 40Tech’s CSS. Blogo didn’t have this option either, but it was present in MarsEdit. That doesn’t mean you’re out of luck with ecto. You can use this heading selection, if you know some basic CSS. All it took was setting up a custom tag using the “Custom Tags” button. In my case, I had to insert the letters “h4” into the custom tag field, give it a name, and highlight text and select that tag whenever I wanted to implement that text styling.
I liked ecto’s image handling the best of the three apps. When you drop an image into ecto, you can select the image margins, padding, float, border, and class. You can also scale the image, and select the file format and quality level.
At first glance, ecto doesn’t appear to let you post only a draft to your site. If you look closely, though, you’ll see a button (among other buttons) at the bottom left of the composition window that lets you change the behavior of the “Publish” button, so that you only publish a draft to your site. You can also set a publish date and time from within the app. To be safe, though, I went into ecto’s settings and set the default behavior to only publish drafts to the site.
ecto wasn’t perfect, but came closest to what I was looking for in a blogging app. Fortunately for me, ecto is also the least expensive of the three apps, at a current price of $19.95.
Each of the apps have other features and tweaks not mentioned here, that may or may not be important to you. Your best bet is to download the trial of each, and see which one works best for you. For me, ecto won out, due to its image handling, and also because of how it handles tags.
Do you use blogging software, or compose your posts directly on your site’s backend? If you do you use software, what do you use?
Earlier this month, we took a look at 4 ways to backup your WordPress blog. That post covered steps you could take to backup your site, including the use of WordPress plugins. We’re always on the lookout for better ways to get things done, and when it comes to backing up a WordPress blog, we’ve found a gem. Updraft is a dead simple plugin that will backup the contents of your site to the cloud (such as Amazon S3) or to an FTP server. You can even have the backup emailed to you.
What makes Updraft so awesome is how simple it is. When I set it up for 40Tech, it automatically set a backup directory on the server. I only had to set the backup interval (daily, weekly, monthly, or manual), and fill in my Amazon S3 account details. When I log into my S3 account, I can see the backup files sitting there.
You can set Updraft to email you when a backup is complete, and to delete the local backup on your server (prior to uploading the backup to the cloud, Updraft generates it in a folder on your server). You can also specify how many backups to keep. Perhaps the best part of Updraft is that your backup can be restored with the click of a button.
One word of warning: if you’re using Amazon S3, don’t use any non-alphanumeric characters in your bucket name. When I first set up Updraft, the backups were sitting on the server, and not being transferred into S3. I had been using a bucket that had an underscore in the name. When I changed that to a simple name, the backups started working as intended.
Updraft is pretty awesome. Have you found anything better?
If you run a website, content may be king, but speed is the cook that keeps the king fed. Recently, we talked about WhichLoadsFaster, a site that compares loading times of two or more websites. How do you improve your site’s chances of being the site that loads faster?One of the best tools for speeding up sites, and one that we use here at 40Tech, is W3 Total Cache, a caching plugin. W3 Total Cache not only speeds up your site, but it can also save you bandwidth.
First, though, let’s look at how WordPress works without a caching plugin. Normally, when someone visits your site, WordPress has to build everything on the page. It does that by processing code, making calls to your database, and outputting the final content that your visitors see in their browsers. Caching strips down this process. The general idea behind caching is that much of this process will (ideally) happen once – the first time someone visits the page. The page is saved at the time of that visit, and the prebuilt version of the page is then displayed to subsequent visitors, for a predetermined period of time.
W3 Total Cache is one of the more advanced caching plugins, so it can be daunting. There are several ways that it can cache your site (all of which we’re using here at 40Tech). The caching options are Page Cache, Minfy, Database Cache, Object Cache, and Browser Cache. You can also set up a CDN (Content Distribution Network).
Most of the settings don’t require any effort at all if you have a typical shared hosting solution. I went with the default settings for almost all of the settings, and they worked without any trouble. The two exceptions to this, and the two that are the most interesting from a geek perspective, are Minify, and the CDN options.
Using a CDN is a way to distribute some of your site images and other files on servers closer to your users. This not only speeds up your site, but also saves you bandwidth. 40Tech uses Amazon’s S3 and Cloudfront, which has a global network and is so cheap it is almost free. All that I had to do was input my Amazon S3 settings on the plugin’s CDN settings page, let the plugin walk me through getting the initial files uploaded, and I was good to go.
How I Set Up the Minify Features
W3 Total Cache’s Minify feature decreases the size and number of CSS and JS files by combining them into one file. You have to configure this, though, which might make your head explode at first glance.
If you take your time and do it in steps, though, it isn’t so hard. I did it by clicking on the Help Wizard button on the minify page, and just going through trial and error. I checked the box next to a few scripts at a time, testing out the site to make sure that I didn’t break anything. Fortunately, W3 Total Cache allows you to preview any changes before deploying them to the site (by clicking the “Preview” button near the top of the plugin settings page). So, if a minfied item messed up the site, I tried it in a different location, and ultimately removed it from the minified settings if it just wouldn’t work. It took time, and eventually I had identified each piece that could be minified. This might not be the ideal way to do it, but for a novice, it works. When you’re done, don’t forget to click the “Deploy” button to have the changes go live on your site.
Are you a site owner? What ways have you found to be speed up your site?
Finding the perfect domain name for your site can be challenge. With a gazillion sites out there, the obvious choices are all taken. Bust a Name can help you come up with something clever, when your brain fails you.
To use Bust A Name, you input words into what Bust A Name calls a “word combiner.” You will then be presented with a list of available domains made up of combinations of the words that you input. You also can organize your words into groups, so that only certain words are combined. For example, when I started 40Tech back in 2009, I put “40” and “forty” in one group, and several geek-related words (tech, geek, etc.) in another group. That ensured that I wouldn’t get results like 40forty.com.
Bust A Name also allows you to save the domains that you like for review, and to save your session to return to it later. If you want to buy a domain, you can select the registrar from a dropdown list, and go right to the registrar’s site.
What tools do you use when you need to cook up a domain name?
