viktor_haag | Why I've gone back to XJournal

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!