Endo and Ecto - Dynamic Blog and Feed Duo

Two new programs I have downloaded onto my computer are endo and ecto, made by Adriaan Tijsseling of Kula Co., Ltd.. They are also the makers of Flickr desktop client 1001, the mood setter widget Whatever, Japanese vocabulary training aid Kotoba, NBA tracker Tip-Off and MLB tracker Ballpark. A lot of their software and scripts are freeware, although endo and ecto are not. What they are is well worth the money, though.

So what are endo and ecto, exactly? Endo is a smart aggregating feed reader, and is now the only feed reader I will use. It is comprehensive, easy to set up, impressively simple to put to use, and as far as I can tell is fairly idiot proof. Ecto is a desktop blog manager that will work with (and import from) nearly any blog platform on the market, including the free ones like Blogger and the pay-to-play ones like Movable Type.

With all of the blogs I write for, both programs have become invaluable, working flawlessly as a team on my MacBook. They interact well with FireFox and Safari, and they aren't bandwidth hogs. You can open as many feeds as you need to, and start as many posts for as many blogs as you'd like with no strain on your system at all. Not only do they play well with others, they fit the Mac "look" as well, key to marketing to the Apple fanatic crowd.

The first half of this dynamic duo is endo, the aggregated feed reader (and so much more). What makes it so special? I'd have to say how easy it is to use. From the moment it is installed endo makes other feed readers look shoddy and using them seem like gargantuan tasks. First of all, it has a smart feed tool that allows you to add a feed directly (by entering the actual feed address url, including the feed code) or indirectly (by entering the web site address only for those sites where you just aren't sure what the feed address is). This is a huge time saver! Now you can add a feed as fast as you can find new sites to track.

Once you have a few feeds entered into endo, you can sort them by category, tags or groups. You can even sort them using colors and rankings. This is a huge help for someone like me - terminally disorganized and incredibly dependent on having the feed I need to reference available at a moment's notice. I tend to sort mine by blog topic and keyword ranking, which probably wouldn't make sense to anyone but me, but since endo lets me do that, who cares if anyone else "gets" me? Endo does!

Endo is more than just a simple feed reader, though. It also has a sync feature, allowing you to add feed events to your iCal program on your Macintosh. This makes sure you won't miss a thing that happens. It's also compatible with iSync, meaning your feeds and schedule will always be up to date with the click of a button. It also uses Spotlight to search the feeds, and smart groups for hierarchical sorting as you go.

You can flag, blog or bookmark content right from the feed by simply right clicking the article preview in the feed that intrigues you. This is especially nice for someone like me, who has multiple blogs they write for others in addition to the ones I write for myself. What a time saver to just right click your way to your next blog post!

Endo also accepts plug ins. If you miss a feature from another feed reader that you'd like to see in endo, just add the plug in. Better yet, create the plug in, use it and test it, then submit it to their site for linking. Be sure to include complete instructions, though. You can subscribe to notifications on the feeds that are most important to you, have it add items to your address book, add a widget notification feature to Dashboard, create a CSS interface for it, download podcasts, videos and images in the background, and write AppleScripts for it. There is really no end to its functionality and ease of use.

The other half of this dynamic duo is ecto, a masterpiece of desktop blogging that accounts for multiple blogs from multiple platforms. Just like endo, ecto was incredibly easy to set up, to get started and to use. When you create a new account, the software allows you to set up users and user groups, and to import almost any web site's content. It simply pops up a window and asks you for the site's address. Then it looks for your blog platform automatically, asking you to confirm it, choose the interface you want to go with it (as in Word Press with the Movable Type API, for example, to accommodate your categories), enter your user name and password and set a few settings. Just like that, you're in!

With ecto, you choose your blog from the list of accounts and click New to start a new entry. It corrects spelling as you type, and offers several tools to make your posts more interesting. You can click a button to include photos from your iPhoto library, songs from your iTunes library, or even piece in your Amazon affiliate code and items for sale. It has an automated tagging feature, category support, and plug in support similar to endo. You can even make templates for different types of posts - handy when you have so many daily blogs, like I do!

Both endo and ecto support scripts, which expands their capabilities endlessly if you have a talent for scripting or know someone who does. In addition to the other features, ecto offers word count capability, track backs, submission tracking, custom codes, a rich text editor and a code editor, along with so much more, all in one simple interface. I'd have to say that with the amount of daily use these two programs are already getting, they have reached the top of my "must buy" list for Mac software. They cost $17.95 each here (or buy both at once and save $8), and while they are geared for optimum usability with Macs, they do come in a PC version as well.