Why I've gone back to XJournal

[viktor_haag]

After some solid years of pretty faithfully using Ecto for my blogging, I've finally become a bit fed up and have moved back to XJournal. I appreciate that the person building Ecto is "just one guy" and has a day job. I also appreciate the difficulties involved in making a one-size-fits-all blogging client. To say that there are protocol standards for blogging is to use the word "standard" in the traditional internet way: wild-ass and ironic stabs at some sort of coherent group of interoperable traditions.

That said, Ecto and the technical savants at whoever-owns-LJ-this-week haven't seen eye to eye for months now.

Ecto has a spanky new release that's significantly more elegant than previous versions, and represents a significant re-write of the codebase. Unfortunately, it's support for LJ is pretty much fatally broken, and has been for some time now. Ecto-creator asserts that this is LJ's fault for claiming to support a standard protocol (Atom) and doing a half-assed job of it. LJ could care less, it seems, about pleasing small software creators/consumers of their blogging protocols, and has even less (it seems) interest in "properly" supporting Atom.

The upshot is I have lost any real reason to use Ecto. I started using it because I liked its interface (I still do), and I liked that it let me blog with one tool on LJ and on Blogger (and on a bunch of other places).

Practically, my use of Blogger has all but dried up with the use I had for doing so, and LJ represents 99% of my blogging activity at this point. So I'm relatively fed up with trying to make a utility tool behave like a screwdriver, when it has no Robertson attachment.

Luckily, development on XJournal seems to have un-ground-to-a-halt at seems to be making use of (and enriching?) LJKit, a Cocoa framework for building LJ clients. There's even a version that doesn't swallow it's own ass on Leopard, so yay, there.

Until further developments occur, then, I'm off the shiny Ecto (for pay) app, and back on the slightly-less-shiny (but free-as-in-speech-and-beer) XJournal. Thanks to the LJKit and XJournal project developers!

Comments

[mind-of-richard.livejournal.com]

I switched back to Xjournal this week. I used for a long time, but decided to try out iJournal. I hate iJournal, and now back with the X.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I chose Ecto over XJournal, specifically for the features, the UI, and so forth. Were it not now rather fundamentally incompatible with LJ, I would still be using Ecto. But we're effectively at an impasse. Mr Ecto says "tell LJ to fix their damn Atom feeds", and LJ says "we don't officially support Atom, blog software authors should implement our proprietary protocol". Bah.

Hopefully, at some point, Mr Ecto will bubble "native" support for LJ up to the top of his priority list, but signs are that this won't be any time soon. I would love to be proven incorrect on that count.