This little desktop blogging tool, Ecto, just became a magic wand for me. It’s funny how you can have a tool sitting around for a while and not quite see all the things it can do. I think about how Harry Potter and his pals learned to use their magic wands. Their initial efforts are clumsy (except Hermione, she’s the real geek in the crew) but soon one of the rest of them - Harry usually - pulls off something truly useful.

What just happened for me is that I have been trying to keep a local copy of my blog on my iMac. I’ve got the MySql and PHP running on the Apache server tucked inside this little 6 year-old relic of a computer. I use the local copy to work out design and writing experiments. But it’s been a pain remembering to copy and paste every time I post - especially when I post to the blog from somewhere else. Ah, but now….

I realized this morning that Ecto might have a feature that allows me to post to more than one blog. Sure enough! It grabs all the posts off of a remote server. And with the click of a button you can redirect a post from one account to another. “Lumos!”.