Once you've gotten rolling with your own Weblog, you'll find that you have tons to say. At first, using a Web-based tool to post works fine, but sooner or later you'll get burned. Say you've spent an hour or more crafting a great, witty post with lots of hyperlinks and images--then your Internet connection hiccups, or your browser crashes, or your blog hosting service goes down--and the whole post is gone.

This is where an offline blog authoring tool can be a lifesaver. Sure, you could use a word processor to write your text, then paste it into a Web-based posting form, but it's nice to have an app that will let you add all the embellishments you want to your entry, without needing any HTML. And if you have more than one blog, or use different hosts for your blogs, being able to work on posts for all of them in one place is a big time-saver.

I tried out four blog editors on the Mac: LittleHJ's BlogWave Studio, Kula's Ecto, Brad Rhine's Frequency, and Ranchero Software's MarsEdit. Two of them, Ecto and Frequency, are also available for Microsoft Windows.

With the exception of BlogWave Studio, these programs don't set up or design your blog; they just let you efficiently create posts and support most blogging systems. All are priced at $25 or less.

If you're not always connected to the Internet when the urge to blog hits you, or if your hosting service isn't super-reliable, you owe it to yourself to give one of these apps a try.

MarsEdit: Easy to Use, Easy on the Eyes

A couple of months ago I picked Ranchero Software's NetNewsWire as my favorite newsreader. Its sibling blog editor, MarsEdit 1.0, is just as slick. It's priced at $25 on its own, but you can buy it with NetNewsWire for $40. Using an RSS reader and blog editor together is especially handy if you like to refer to news items in your own posts, and this pairing makes it very easy to do so--although NetNewsWire lets you use any offline blog editor you prefer.

MarsEdit's interface is clean and easy to understand, with a large, clearly labeled toolbar at the top, and panes and drawers that you can figure out intuitively. If you have multiple blogs, you can quickly pick which one you want to work on by clicking its name in a slide-out drawer.

In MarsEdit's New Post window, the HTML pulldown menu holds all the commands you need to style your text or embellish it with images or links, and you can save code strings you use frequently as custom tags.

Even if you didn't use MarsEdit to post entries, you can import them into MarsEdit and edit or delete them. This takes one click of the Refresh button. Saving your post as a draft or sending it to your blog are also one-click procedures.

Just one thing was kind of a hassle with MarsEdit: It didn't let me create titles for my Blogger entries within the program. I had to log into my Blogger account and enter the titles from the Blogger Web interface. This is a known issue related to Blogger's API for syndication, and Ranchero Software says it is working on a fix.

Ecto: Efficiency and Nice Extras

Ecto 2.3.4, $18, is another sophisticated authoring and posting tool that makes composing and posting blog items easy. Its interface is a bit busier than MarsEdit's, mainly because it puts more options onto the toolbar rather than putting them in drawers or menus, and its window is smaller.

Ecto's wizard-based setup is especially easy to use; all you have to know to get started is the URL for your blog, and your own user name and password. Ecto finds the rest of the information it needs to communicate with your blog host--and this is not trivial, because other programs make you do more legwork.

Ecto's capabilities are comparable to MarsEdit's, with a couple of nice additions. Ecto allows you to create titles for Blogger, and the toolbar has an Amazon button that lets you quickly search for and link to items (like books or movies mentioned in your post) on the retailer's site. There are similar buttons for quick access to items in your ITunes and IPhoto collections.

You don't have to manually import previous posts into Ecto when you first start up; Ecto downloads them automatically. But you can specify in Preferences how you want Ecto to handle older posts: You can download them all, leave them on your blog server and ignore them, or just get the headlines and summaries.

Frequency: Forget It

This $19 blog editor is currently in version 2, but it still feels unfinished. Its interface isn't nearly as polished as either MarsEdit's or Ecto's. The hassles start when you try to set up the links to your blog accounts: Frequency asks you for rather technical information such as your blog's API and RPC host, which allow other programs to communicate with your blog server.

Although Frequency's documentation tells you what these are for Blogger, and it provides the most common APIs for other blog systems, I had to dig into TypePad's support FAQ to find its XML-RPC URL. And I had to know my blog ID number. Compared with Ecto's simple setup, setting up Frequency was way too hard. It took three tries to successfully post to my TypePad blog.

To post images using Frequency, you have to upload the files to your blog server separately, then enter the URLs for them in your post. What's worse, the program is buggy: For example, the Visit Weblog button, which should open a browser window and display your blog, just didn't work.

With its annoying nag screen that pops up all too frequently until you register, Frequency is worse than no improvement over posting to a Web-based form. I'm removing it from my system before it nags me again.

BlogWave Studio: Make a Blog on .Mac

BlogWave Studio, from LittleHJ, is somewhat different from the other three offline editors I tried: It lets you set up a new blog, but you must have a .Mac account. Membership in Apple's .Mac costs $99 per year, and you need your own Internet service. It's not an ISP, but it offers extras like online calendar and address-book syncing, free tutorials and software, an e-mail address, a home-page builder, and 250MB of online storage (called IDisk). BlogWave Studio, $20, lets you use some of that 250MB for a blog.

Configuring the connection to .Mac from BlogWave Studio was as simple as entering a user name and a password, and the blog design process was fairly easy as well. There's a good selection of templates, and they are customizable using a visual CSS editor. You can set up your blog to accept comments using Haloscan, an external service.

BlogWave Studio assumes that you use IPhoto to manage your images, which most Mac users probably do, but I don't. I couldn't find any way to import images that aren't in an IPhoto library.

Each time you create a new entry, you choose whether it will be a general (text-based), music, photo, movie, or file-sharing post. While it's nice to be able to switch formats at the level of individual blog entries, there should be a way to set a default so that you don't have to see the dialog box every time. And the Photo Album entry type has way too many options to work through every time, starting with "Choose a frame for your photo." I don't want kooky little frames on my photos, and I don't want to be asked after the first time. This intrusiveness strikes me as rather unsophisticated interface design.

More bothersome is the text editor: You don't just open a window and type until you're done. Instead, you enter a paragraph, then click the "Add a paragraph to this entry" button. You also have to click an Add (plus sign) button to give yourself a fresh field for more text. If you want to use HTML tags to separate paragraphs, you could type all of your text in one pass. But when you enter just one text block and try to save it, you get a warning dialog box that says you can add more paragraphs. This interface design is confusing and amateurish.

Despite the interface annoyances, BlogWave Studio is the best program I found for blogging from a .Mac account. There are a couple of similar programs available: Lifli's $20 IBlog, and Brad Rhine's $40 Tangelo. I've tried both, and they each have some strengths. They also work with more servers than just .Mac. But BlogWave Studio is more full-featured than either one.

My Pick

Ecto costs $18, a slightly lower price than the other programs I tried. And its support for titles in Blogger is a significant advantage. Provided you've already got a blog set up, Ecto is what I'd suggest for composing and posting efficiently.

Comments or questions? Drop a line to The Mac Skeptic.