Was this a good idea or not? I was tinkering around with that last, big post and realized that ecto had announced that the latest version was available. There are some updates I’ve been waiting for in the new version, so I was all set to download it and give it a whirl.

A caveat: it required that I uninstall my previous version of ecto. I didn’t want to lose a huge amount of settings, data, and that one big draft post, so I finished it as “Adventures in Paradise, Part 1.”

I did the reinstall – during this process, I got a warning about a shared file – did I want to delete it or not? One option was “if you are not sure, click ‘no’ ” so that’s what I did.

According to the specs, V 2.0 was supposed to go get whatever version of .NET if it needed an update. It did not do this during the install, and there was some sort of non-fatal error during the process. When I went to start it, however, ecto threw a fatal hissy. So I found in the readme.txt docs (really, guys, this isn’t supposed to be that difficult) where to download the needed .NET version. Again, there was some sort of odd error during the installation of .NET. Whee, etc.

Finally, got ecto to start. Began this post, clicked “save as draft.” and exited. I wanted to see how it behaved.

10 minutes and a reboot later, I finally got ecto restarted. Just now, however, I found an ecto mini-icon in the system tray, somewhere it didn’t live before back when it was just a pup of  a version number 1.8.8.

Hmm. However, there are all kinds of interesting rich text buttons to explore, including (joy! bliss! Rapture!) numbered and bulleted lists. But not, alas, blockquote (although there is “indent”), but that’s okay: to my great relief, all my settings, blogs, and html snippets made it into the new version after uninstalling the previous one (but not, however, deleting any of the companion files that were in the same directory).  

When I started the installation, I was:

1. A little nervous
2. Worried that I’d lose a lot of shit
3. Paranoid enough that I made a zipfile of the previous version

In switching back and forth between rich text and HTML version, I can see a hell of a lot of unnecessary <code><p></code> tags.

I wonder if my fancy image templates made it over?

Ooh! Me likey! This handles images a little better than before – fewer steps, and it displays the image in the entry window in Rich Text view, rather than just the code. It still does that in the HTML view. The picture, by the way, is from a womens’ shop up in Makawao, Maui, where I spent a lot of time, dollars and sweat buying a pair of board shorts. I liked the lanterns when I first walked in.

Except… WHOA!!! Not good. When I checked the HTML view, some of my template code was repeated a bunch of times. Not, not, not good. Did I do something wrong, or is this a bug?  I have to check my image upload templates now.

That is really odd behavior, and I may have to report it as a bug if it’s not something I need to fix in the template. Basically, the cursor seems to be stuck in the image’s DIV if I’m in rich text mode. I have to flip into the HTML view and put some text in after the closing tag in order to keep it from doing this.

Let’s try something else. How does this indent deal work?

The ecto 2.0 is officially released and available for download! It has been a long development process, far longer than I anticipated or wished, but I think the result is pretty good. Although the application does not look much different outwardly, there are many code rewrite under the skins. This upgrade is free for all registered users.

But getting out of it is harder than it looks. Again, I had to go into HTML mode. I think I have to click the indent button a second time to tell it where to end.

And now, to see if this new version posts or not.