I was sick, sick I tell you, of my blog workflow.

I have a license for Sixapart's Movable Type—which doesn't do me a whole lot of good since I support myself—but I was frustrated with the tools I needed to use it.

First, I'd compose in Ecto, software written by an inexcusably laggard developer, save a published version which I'd immediately fish out using Movable Type's web interface, bring the results into BBEdit, and tweak and polish from there. I wouldn't be so harsh toward Adriaan, Ecto's main developer, except for the fact that the RTF engine munges any HTML you produce as soon as you re-publish. This presents serious usability issues for web developers and bloggers who use CSS in even the most rudimentary of ways.

A few months ago I posted a complaint regarding Ecto's munging of CSS and mentioned that was one of the reason's I looked forward to the Ecto 3 update. I've been waiting since April and Adriaan is good at nothing if he is not good at promising his users that an update is "soon to come." I'm guessing Adriaan didn't approve my comment because he fears such comments would prevent users from buying his broken product.

I've been running with Tinderbox since January. Actually, I've had a license since January and did not start to grapple with the program until April. I started figuring out more of its pieces in June and by mid-July I was in full research swing. Yesterday morning, I wrapped my head around publishing to HTML using Tinderbox and made the research for my current article web-accessible. Those results were not very pretty.

This page improves on what I learned.