Re-Post: Blogging From TextMate
Posted on May 12th, 2008 in General |
I had written about blogging from TextMate on an older version of theKiesch and recently found a backup of older articles. I thought it would make a good permanent article on here so I am re-posting with a few cool things I’ve picked up after using it a while.
TextMate has been an unofficial standard for Rails developers for quite some time. With all of the shortcuts and snippets, I sometimes don’t know how I would survive without it. But there are tons of other uses for this simple-yet-powerful text editor.
Allan Odgaard posted a screencast almost two years ago about using the editor to write blog posts. It shows anyone how to get everything set up to start. I’ve been using it almost exclusively to write my blog posts every since I had seen this.
I can add images like the following one by just dragging the image onto the textarea.
It automatically adds alt tags using a human readable version of the filename.
Another thing I really like is that if I have a url currently in my clipboard, I can select a section of text and my pressing ctrl+shift+l it will take the text and wrap it in an “a” tag with a link to the current site on the clipboard. Not only that, but it adds a title tag to your link with the web page’s title.
While on my 30 streak of posting every day, I’ve also been post-dating the articles so I can write them ahead of time. I can simple add Date: 2008-05-13 to the meta information at the top and it will hold off until that date.
One of the problems I had before though was that I couldn’t post tags. I was using the ultimate tag warrior plugin and since that wasn’t a built in feature of WordPress I had to still sign in and add tags, but after 2.3, you can by specifying the Keywords in the meta information as well.
Sometimes it’s easier to write when I have no other distractions. There is also an OSX plugin that lets you make any application full screen without the title bar showing. You can get the Megazoomer plugin for free and just press command-enter to enter full-screen mode.
One of the only things I haven’t yet figured out how to do is assign custom fields. A lot of the magazine style themes using custom fields to assign images with a post, so if you have one of these said themes you may still have to set that manually, but once it is posted you’ll be able to use TextMate to edit the posts later on.
