ectoize - bookmarklet for ecto

We received an interesting email from an ecto customer recently. Here's what they asked us about:

"Hello, Any text that I publish using the "ectoize" bookmarklet appears on my blog entirely in italics, indented, with a vertical line on the left side of the text. I've searched high-and-low but can't find any reference to this problem on your website or in the documentation. Can you help? Thanks."

Of course, since we didn't have the full context, we had to chat back and forth a bit to figure out what they were really trying to do. They had been advised by a WordPress consultant to use ectoize, the ecto bookmarklet, as a tool to help them migrate content from a static web site (which had been created in GoLive) to a new site, managed in WordPress.

ectoize, the bookmarklet, grabs a chunk of highlighted text from a web browser window, launches ecto, and pastes the text into a nice little block quote. The italics and vertical line were coming from the user's CSS stylesheet, which defined a nice blockquote style.

ectoize normally does this:

ectoize:

After installing the bookmarklet, you can create weblog entries from any webpage you are visiting. When viewing a page that you want to write about, select some text you want to quote, and then choose or click the "ectoize" item from the browser's Bookmarks Bar. This will open a new draft window in ecto with text from and details about the current webpage.

[From bookmarklet for ecto]

The styling is determined by your CSS style for the "blockquote" tag.

To use ecto to help migrate the content of a static web site (initially created in GoLive, iWeb or any other HTML authoring tool) you can simply cut the text from the site using CMD-C and paste it into an ecto compose window with CMD-V.

If you want to preserve HTML tags from your original site, you could View-Source on the original site, then cut and paste the right portions of the HTML. Be sure to keep your tags balanced.