while i like wordpress‘s interface several zillion times more than i did that of movable type, find, i just cannae seem to write freely in a browser form window. i dunno what it is; the thought that if the browser crashes i’ll loose everything…?, working in that cramped wee box [even allowing for omniweb's almost great 'form edit window']…? or something to do with constantly having to insert HTML markup…? that breaks my chain of thought. but i just find it really hard generating the kind of witty, easy flowing prose which i seem to churn out on a regular basis when emailing my friends and family.
of course, it could just be another manifestation of that strange kind of ‘stage fright’ which causes all the ‘not-even-paying-attention-to-what-i’m-doing’ scribbles on the backs of envelopes, phonebills and beermats i do, to turn out far superior than anything i’ve ever produced when confronted with the intimidating whiteness of a new page in one of my ‘official’ sketchbooks.
anyway, whatever the reason, i found myself taking another look at client apps for wordpress again this weekend as a slightly tangental follow-up on my discovery that there actually exist some OSX client apps for livejournal out there.
<begin tangental musings>
i got ‘bullied’ into opening a livejournal by some of my buddies a while back and, although i can kinda see the value in it [i treat it as a more literary and intelligent version of IRC-ing with your mates, than as a proper 'journal'], it really does have the most abysmal web interface ever! so imagine my delight to discover the wonderful xjournal on a trawl through macupdate the other night. not only is it free!… but it’s ‘built in scotland, frae girrrderrrs!!!’ – well maybe not quite, but it is a good piece of celtic software! and it makes posting to livejournal an almost pain-free experience. i highly recommend it to any fellow mac-using ‘LJ-ers’ out there!
</end tangental musings>
… and so back to wordpress client apps; flushed with my rediscovery of the joys of client app posting, i thought i might see whether there was anything out there which would serve a similar de-stressing role for WP. i still had a copy of the ‘so close to being wonderful’ ecto lying around on my hard drive, so [remembering it was supposed to be WP compatible], i fired it up and…. er…. ran into all kinds of bollox!
for a start ecto just wouldnae retrieve my previous postings, categories… or anything for that matter!… and kept throwing up ’404 errors’ which i deduced meant some file it was trying to interact with on my server was missing or misplaced. my best bet was wordpress‘s XMLRPC file, which i remembered was called xmlrpc.php. so i FTP’d into my server to try and track this down [and make sure ecto was looking for it in the right place!] and, ‘lo and behold’, i couldnae find the fucker anywhere! much scratching of the bonce later i sought refuge in the support forums of the wordpress website, where i found that, the reason i couldnae find xmlrpc.php on my server was that it had accidentally been left out of the latest distro of wordpress!
the fact that there was no mention of this on the main wordpress site and i only found it out by running a search in the support forums is a fuckin’ joke [and judging from the tone of the posts i did read, i'm not the only one who thinks this!]. i mean, how long would it have taken the developers of wordpress [on discovering their mistake] to repackage and upload the archive and stick a quick note on their frontpage telling people where to get the missing file? – instead of relying on people to dig through their user forums for an answer. [actually too many companies these days seem to think that 'support' consists of setting up a user forum which they themselves seldom deign to visit and leaving the proles to sort each other out - but that's another rant for another day!]
well. to cut a long rant slightly shorter, i eventually found the missing xmlrpc.php file on sourceforge and installed it, only to find that ecto still couldnae retrieve any info! at this point i was prepared to bin ecto as being the culprit and so downloaded marsedit to give that a spin instead. marsedit , however, suffered a similar lack of connectivity to this oul’ bilge and i was about to give up and resign myself to eternally posting via my browser when, a last ‘clutching at straws’ google for ‘wordpress xmlrpc ecto’ brought me to this post on ‘taking the red pill’ which showed that the fault lay, not with ecto or marsedit but with the wordpressxmlrpc.php file itself. luckily by downloading red pill’s modified xmlrpc.php file and installing that, i was able [finally!] to get ecto and marsedit to ‘play nice’ with wordpress and was thus able to re-enter the heady world of desktop client blog posting.
… and after a quick evaluation, i’ve decided that ecto [although it has its faults], still has the edge on marsedit, so i’m sticking wi’ thon til my dream blogposting app comes along!
