In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.

Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)

Previous Workflow

When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:

• Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
• Fill out the text for “Title: “
• Write the post
• Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
• Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)

Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.

Problems With This Workflow

• Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
• Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
• No live preview
• Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
• File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)

Features That I Hope To Keep

• Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
• Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.

And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.