Installed QuickPost. This should make quick blogging random links I find interesting all the easier to do.
- Easier and faster. While the posts will eventually make it to the feed reader of your choice, the tweets generated via a plugin notifies a Twitter follower much faster.
- Realization: Tweets are much less valuable than full posts that aren’t limited to 140 (160, in actuality) characters. Hence, leveraging the quickness of tweets to link to a more information-laden post is awesome.
- Problem: Duplications.
- I link to something online.
- I post on the blog.
- Blog posts to Twitter.
- Feed reader grabs the post.
- Blog grabs the day’s worth of Twitter posts into a post (but silently).
- What happens if I post a link to Twitter instead?
- This is a change to the workflow… I don’t want people on Twitter to unnecessarily click on an extra link to get to the data…
- I’m going to just see how this goes. It’s not like it’s not getting “documented” somewhere anyway.
- Easier and faster. While the posts will eventually make it to the feed reader of your choice, the tweets generated via a plugin notifies a Twitter follower much faster.
Created a “Links” category for all posts made using this quickpost.
Created a “Mac Applications” for review mac applications. Thinking about making a “Mac Development” for… you guessed it. I’m wondering if I should be collapsing a few of these categories, but seriously, it’s kinda like that multi-year project of putting all of my old posts up here: It’s not really particularly important.
Changed the prefix to a new blog post tweet that gets set to Twittter from “New blog post:” to “Blog’d:”.
Tag Archive for 'wordpress'
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.
It might be of interest that I’m doing this in MarsEdit after a quick run-through of both MarsEdit and Ecto applications. I hope to have a full blog post.
As I was in the shower, I realized how meta all of this became again. I blogged on how I updated Wordpress, my blogging software of choice. I am now blogging on the current status of how I’m blogging. I will be blogging on blogging applications for the mac.
I took a screen shot and annotated it to show you how crazy it’s becoming. You see how the coding is off to the side, while the blogging insanity continues into the wee hours of the next morning?
This is halfway a test of MarsEdit and halfway an actual post.
Sidenote: After opening this post (which was written in MarsEdit) in Ecto, Ecto has informed me of the dirty HTML MarsEdit was outputting. What is the deal with that?
More or less a changelog for myself, so when I look back on today, I’ll see that I was actually a bit effective in doing things.
- Three columns over two
- We’ve got larger screens, time to start using them
- Still keeping the main content area to 400px width, and so images to be framed within 400×300px.
- Used the new third column specifically for Twitter updates
- Turned off “Advanced Navigation” in K2: Wasn’t working anyway…
- Making Twitter Updates into Asides
- I’m starting to use Twitter enough, but they shouldn’t be the main content of the site. It’s starting to make sense that they serve to be jumping boards to full-fledged posts on a topic
- Moving back to “Personal” as the default category
- For some reason, I started to make personal posts into “Asides”, but it turns out, this site can be about myself also
- “Asides”, as mentioned above, is used for Twitter
- “Asides” = “Twitter Updates”
And with that, hopefully I’ll start the template tweaking I’ve been waiting to do for days, nay, years.
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