Tag Archive for 'textmate'

TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)

Published
by
Josh Kim
on September 18, 2008
in Mac Applications and Site News
. Comments

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.

Legend… wait for it… “air”-y.

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 11, 2008
in Apple
. Comments

It has happened. It took me quite a long while to do this, but, I pulled the trigger. Now to spend the rest of the night configuring the darn thing so I can actually start doing some work.

Sidenote: I love Time Machine. It’s just the restoring part that’s a little painful and untrustworthy. Time to do what I do best: Go and bring a machine back to its awesome state after a reformat (in this case, a new purchase).

Another Sidenote: I haven’t posted on the blog using the actual Wordpress interface for a while. Doesn’t seem to shabby, but I still prefer the TextMate bundle.

A Third Sidenote:  Wordpress on Safari doesn’t like to retain html tags in the visual edit mode. That’s why the post before without paragraph tags. What’s the deal…

WordPress Related Fun: TextMate Blogging Bundle’s Time Zone Bug and UltimateTagWarrior

Published
by
Josh Kim
on December 31, 2007
in Web Applications
. Comments

REMINDER TO SELF: Times are finally set to the correct Central Standard Time.

This is more of a summary post on what I’ve been doing with this Wordpress installation.

Tags Galore

I’ve finally taken some time with Wordpress, and it seems like Ultimate Tag Warrior is no more. Luckily, Wordpress has nice importers from people who used other tagging plugins in the past.

There are still a few bugs I have to work out with the code I changed when I did use UTW.

TextMate Time Zone Blogging Bundle Issue

I noticed this a while back, but never really looked into it. After poking around the int3rw3bz0rz, it seems like there was an actual bug with the timestamps.

Sidenote: Blogging Bundle. Holy crap, get some nested comments… or a forum… or SOMETHING ELSE. This is seriously why I think blog comments are broken, but that’s another project idea for another day.

Regardless, this is what you want. From the MacroMates wiki:

Specifying Date Created

There has been a few problems related to correct dates. This comes from the fact that the dateCreated argument (in the XML-RPC protocol) has no time zone info, and until WordPress 2.2 it was interpreted mostly as server time.

Starting with WordPress 2.2 this field is GMT and dates should be offset correctly.

Unfortunately WordPress 2.2.1 introduced a Z in the date format which breaks Ruby 1.8.2’s XML-RPC parser — so if you use WordPress 2.2.1 then you need to update your installed Ruby version. If you have MacPorts installed then you can run sudo port install ruby and update your PATH. See RubyVersionIssues for help with that.

Even more unfortunately, the next version of WordPress will revert its date handling to before 2.2 and so, after that release, dates will again use the wrong offset.

Just need to be really careful and just set the timestamp in the “Date” field by adding the appropriate amount of offset. For this post, I would have to add 6 hours to the hour every time I update to make sure I’m not adding a 6 hour offset.

Wordpress 2.3.2

Updated. Feels good to be back in the blogging game.

Another Reason for NetBeans and Ruby

Published
by
Josh Kim
on September 4, 2007
in Web Development
. Comments

As posted previously, I’ve been looking into other alternatives to doing Rails, other than the industry-standard TextMate, and it seems like NetBeans is a viable choice.

Now I have another reason to use NetBeans (although, it seems like it’s a little bit slow for my tastes): Collab.

Reading through some more XP documentation, I come across the lovely page on Pair Programming. This isn’t something new, but I didn’t know that XP stressed this so much. I just kinda thought it was something you do if you can… but hey!

All code to be included in a production release is created by two people working together at a single computer. Pair programming increases software quality without impacting time to deliver. It is counter intuitive, but 2 people working at a single computer will add as much functionality as two working separately except that it will be much higher in quality. With increased quality comes big savings later in the project.

Emphasis are mine.

Wow. If that’s the case, I better start doing some more pair programming somehow. And seeing how the three team members on the project (Amir Manji, Derek Remund, and I) who are all four or more hours apart… I need something that’ll give me this wonderful ability.

I’ll continue to write on this IDE as I get more chance to play around with it.

EDIT: Of course, if I was smart enough to think things through, I would have checked if the same was implemented on Eclipse. Turns out… it is. It’s called “Eclipse Communication Framework“.

Frick on a Stick. I have to sit through both of these impressive Java IDE’s? Netbeans vs Eclipse?

New Goals: Pre-Month in Review

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 22, 2007
in Site News and Web Development
. Comments

Before the month’s over… and I have to do yet another one of those crazy Month in Review’s… I think I need to take this time to refocus a bit.

Lent Commitments… Uh oh…

Originally, it was:

Initially, for Lent, I had given up things like YouTube, TV shows, and movies. Then I started to play Quake… ONE. Oh man, how much fun. I think I must have sunk a good chunk of time into it. Well… I’m going to say this here: All forms of electronic entertainment is forbidden until Easter.

This includes: ANYTHING Flash, ANY passive media… It’s quite hard, seeing how almost EVERYWHERE I go, there’s a TV on or a browser open to YouTube. Time to strategize how to avoid those situations…

Bible reading is going well. Kinda getting behind (I think… I’m not sure…), because I’m really trying to learn Philippians before Easter… but that’s only an excuse. By the end of this month, I want to be fully caught up. I need to do some math in terms of how many chapters I, then, have to read to catch up. We’ll see, at the end of the month.

Let’s just say I’ve broken… a few of them. I probably pulled a JK^extreme again and went overboard on making up incredibly difficult and unnecessary commitments. For example, I picked up playing StarCraft again. It’s fun. It’s not nearly as addicting as before (I’ve matured, hooray!), and so I’ve been playing to get my mind off of things… I didn’t really feel guilty about playing it, but after thinking about a little bit, I feel bad that I didn’t feel guilty enough to not start it up.

So what do I do… Do I go into insane failure layer mode, give up everything and just forget about Lent? Well, I have to question my motives in even setting up these incredibly insane goals for myself.

I don’t want to give up something that I don’t do normally anyway. So something like watching TV… I don’t do it that much to begin with. I might do it occasionally, but giving that up to…

You know what? From the time I joined Covenant Fellowship Church until now, I’ve never been a fan of Lent. I’m still very much unsure of why we even do this thing. While going through the Internet, I ran into this interesting page: The True Meaning of Lent. While it is from a different denomination than mine (PCA), it definitely brings up many great points.

So before this turns into a post that I should create a new category “Religion” for, I’m going to end this here with this:

I’m going to get rid of all the things I’ve abstained from. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to go start getting addicted to gaming or movies or whatever, but that I won’t be feeling guilty whenever I break the “promise”, or at least, the illusion of it that I’ve created for myself.

However, the things that I’ve decided to add to my list of “things to do”, I’m going to keep. Reading the Word as well as memorizing Philippians has been incredibly helpful for me (even though… I’ve fallen behind quite a bit). I’m not doing these things merely because they’re on the list, but because I genuinely believe that they are helping me in my walk with God.

As soon as I focus on doing the positives, these unnecessary things will fall by the wayside anyway. I just need to make sure I follow through with the things I know will help me grow.

And seriously, Josh Kim, it’s your pride for setting up these insane goals. You wanted to feel all high and mighty if you kept them, right? You idiot…

I love setting up myself for failure. Yummy.

Summary: Read Bible. Memorize Philippians. Keep fighting. Don’t waste time.

Books

Definitely want to finish up Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age… I think I might do my first ever book review on this blog on this book. Heck, it’s the first non-programming book I’ll be finishing up in years.

The book Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers) doesn’t seem that useful… at least… $20 useful. This book definitely adds to the online documentation at macromates, but I feel as if the pdf version of this book should have been included with the crazy price of TextMate. Definitely want to take my time with this book, though… seeing how I use this app hourly.

Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers): What is wrong with the manufacturer of this book? The text is printed on a slant. It’s readable, but it bugs the crap out of me. And also, THIS?

Binding Issue

It’s not just this book, but it’s also the case with the TextMate book (it’s not as noticeable because that book is thinner and the pages are thicker). I hope it’s just this batch of books of the Pragmatic Programmers series. I asked for a return on this one… so I won’t be able to dip into the Ruby on Rails just yet. Besides, I want to learn more Ruby before I go deeper. Should I just go and buy Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition?

Waiting for Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days to come in the mail. I know for a fact I will love this book.

Summary: Read Hackers & Painters by end of the month. Textmate, take your time. Founder’s by the end of next month.

Consulting/Freelancing/Blogging/Entrepreneurship…ing

I felt like all these things go hand in hand. This is basically my life, or at least, it should be.

I like my “job”. I like having a steady income from a part-time job with College of Education at University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign. I like having clients to work for. I like setting my own hours (as you can see with the insane timestamp of this post). I like working wherever I want… from my apartment to the library…

I like my blog. I love being able to write about whatever’s on my mind on whatever subject I please. I love being able to strategize about how to best present the content, the information… how to monetize… ahem

I love thinking about the company I’ll be starting soon. I love doing market research. I love being my own marketing department, almost tearing my hair out trying to come up with a cool company/service names. I love imagining all the services I could provide through the company. I love thinking about the tax benefits of incorporating from one state compared to another.

The only problem I see right now… is the lack of health insurance. I don’t bring in enough to have a personal plan for myself, nor do I have health issues to begin with… it’s just something that bothers me from time to time.

But in terms of things to get done before the end of the month:

  • College of Education
    • Get Active Directory working in ColdFusion
    • Templates for moodle working
    • Fix moodle bugs, submit to moodle CVS repository
  • Freelancing
    • Finish up drupal customization
    • Finish up portfolio
    • Actively seek out clients
  • Blog
    • New template, new categories, new… old posts… blah blah blah

Summary: Get work done. Finish redesign on paper by end of the month. Finalize what is to be done with hanmeta.

I Can’t Sleep

I’m currently sick. And yet, I don’t really feel like going to sleep.

I really hope I don’t start writing another post tonight…