» Quick Start
» Creating Accounts
» Posts and Drafts
» Creating Drafts
» About the Editor
» Draft Preview
» Posting Drafts
» Editing Posts
» Sending Notifications
» File and Image Upload
» Advanced Features
» Preferences
» Payment
» Troubleshooting
» Keyboard Shortcuts

Settings

ecto maintains two sets of settings: Application-wide settings and blog-based settings.

Application-wide

Via ecto ▶ Settings ▶ General… you can change application-wide settings for ecto. These include, for example:

  • Default Editor: The default editing mode for new drafts.
  • Draft Listing: These are discussed in the Posts and Drafts section.
  • Spellcheck: If checked, spell-checking will be enabled by default for all text editing fields. When it is not enabled by default, you can always turn it on temporarily using the Edit ▶ Spelling menu.
  • Summary: If checked and if you're using a MovableType API compatible blog system, ecto will create a summary using MacOSX's Summarize service tool when you save a draft that has an empty summary field.
  • Startup: Optionally configure ecto to open a new draft on startup and/or remember opened drafts; refresh listing of posts; check for new updates.
  • Keep older posts when refreshing the list of recent posts: Some blog systems only return a limited number of posts. To prevent the returned list to replace the local list, keep this option checked so that any older posts will be preserved.
  • Save drafts automatically: Check to have new drafts automatically saved periodically.
  • Default time-out for connections: Increase this value if you notice connections are timing out prematurely.

Blog-based

Via ecto ▶ Settings ▶ Weblog… you can change settings for the current blog or all blogs for the current account. Blog settings include, for example:

  • Editor defaults: Font, alignment, colors, CSS, templates are all configurable. Additional defaults for dictionary language, formats, and more are present.
  • Pings: A list of weblog directory ping urls. If the list is empty and you press the '+' button, ecto automatically inserts the default urls.
  • Confirmation: A set of settings to request confirmation before posting posts. This is useful if you want to make sure all necessary fields are filled.
  • Publishing:
    Encode HTML-entities: By default, ecto converts all special characters in your draft to HTML entities before sending it to your blog server. This is a highly recommended option, because if you are not using UTF-8 as default character-encoding for your weblog, special characters can break data transmission of text between ecto and your servers. It will also lead to problems in browser display for your weblog posts.
  • Time: Allows for timezone adjustment, for example, when you are blogging from a different timezone than the one set in your blog system or when your blog system is not handling timezones properly. Note that ecto sends dates as UTC. Your blog is supposed to convert the received time to the timezone that you have set in the blog system's control panel. Quite a few blog systems do not handle timezone differences properly. If you notice discrepancies in dates of drafts you publish, try selecting your blog's timezone or request advice in the support forum.