Like many other members of Team ProfHacker, I make frequent use of class blogs. I’ve written before about tools that can be useful for managing multiple class blogs, including various blogging clients.
This post isn’t another rundown of those editors. Instead, it’s a quick update that might be of interest to those considering using a blog editor to work with multiple blogs on a WPMU installation (I wrote about why one might want to consider WPMU back in December; there’s some good discussion in the comments section there.)
About midway through the spring semester, though, I ran into some difficulty. I’d been using Ecto, which I liked very much, as my editor. It had support for WordPress pages (WordPress allows you to have a main blog page plus as many other pages as you like, which makes it very handy for running a small website, not just a blog), which put it ahead of some of its competitors for me. It also handled my WPMU installation very well, after I made a minor edit to one of the files in the installation.
Then, one day, it no longer played nicely with WPMU. Things weren’t posting correctly for some reason, and I couldn’t sort it out. I hadn’t made any changes to any of the key files in the installation. So I tried deleting and re-adding the blogs in my Ecto setup. That didn’t work; whenever I tried to add any of my class blogs, I got a list of posts for all of them. And now I can’t find the original fix to double-check the file I edited. When I Google Ecto+WPMU, I see the link to where I originally found my solution. Unfortunately, it seems to be down (at least at the time I’m writing this).
In the meantime, there’s been an update to MarsEdit, which I had looked at earlier, but opted against because it didn’t support WordPress pages. Now it does, so I’ve made the switch. I set up accounts for each of the blogs on my WPMU install, and everything worked perfectly. I do wish that MarsEdit allowed me to drag and drop posts from one blog to another as Ecto did, but copy and paste allows for a fairly speedy functional alternative.
This seems to be the way things work with digital tools; the technology keeps changing at a fairly rapid pace, so there’s no guarantee that what works really well at one point in time will continue to work. That said, a little digging is likely to turn up something else that will do the job.
That need for flexibility and adaptation is, I suppose, as much the point of this post as the update on blog editors is. If you’ve got experiences of having to find alternate tools or ways of doing things (or comments or suggestions about other blog editors), please share them in the comments.
[Image by Flickr user Wesley Fryer / Creative Commons licensed]
