TextMate Tips

The best tips for the best text editor

Blogging with TextMate

This is another tip I found just from experimenting with the Bundles. There’s a great bundle for Blogging straight from TextMate and I use it most of the time I write in my blogs now. You can find it under Bundles > Blogging (imagine that). It takes a little setting up first so let’s go over that. Note that my experience is limited to WordPress so that will be the context of this tip.

XML-RPC

XML-RPC is a great tool of which many blogging apps make use. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language and RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. To quote xmlrpc.com:

It’s a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.

It’s remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

WordPress comes with the file ‘xmlrpc.php’ at the root of the wordpress directory. To setup TextMate to post directly to your blog just go to Bundles > Blogging > Setup Blogs. All you need is your domain name on the left and your path to the xmlrpc file with a slight addition of your user name. For example my setup page looks like this:

# Blog Name             URL
erikreagan.com          http://YOUR_USERNAME@erikreagan.com/xmlrpc.php
textmatetips.com        http://YOUR_USERNAME@textmatetips.com/w/xmlrpc.php

Obviously you will be putting your user name in place of “YOUR_USERNAME”. Once you have this setup you can start blogging through TextMate.

Create a Blog Entry

To create a new blog first open a new document and make sure you’re set to Blog (I use Blog - HTML but there are other formate). There are a few tab triggers you can use to get started. First type ‘blog’ and tab out. This will give you the choices for your blogs you have setup. You can do the same by typing ‘cat’ and tabbing out. This will tell TextMate to go grab your categories and let you pick from them. Don’t forget your title! Just type ‘title’ and tab out. You can review the header options in the Blogging bundle menu. Once your post is complete you can Post to Blog by using Ctrl+Cmd+P (⌃ ⌘ P). Upon posting the new entry your default browser should open to your newly created post.

Adding Photos

As if this weren’t easy enough you can simply add photos by dragging them onto your TextMate window and selecting the blog to upload the file to. Your image tag and attributes are automatically inserted into your new post! The only thing I don’t currently like about this feature is that it doesn’t create the thumbnails that WordPress automatically creates by default. However if you are blogging in HTML straight through TextMate you may have already prepared thumbnail versions of your pictures.

Editing Posts

If you’d like to modify a post that is already published on your site you can easily do that straight through TextMate. In the Blogging bundle there is a Fetch Post option that will grab whichever posts you tell it to. Unfortunately this is limited to Posts and not Pages (to my knowledge). Fetching a post will pull in all of the original data for you to view including the post number, date & time published, tags (or keywords), permalink, category, and more.

Blog Away!

Hopefully this has been a helpful tip to get your blogging from TextMate. I use this frequently but it is certainly not perfect. If I have an image I need resized and I don’t want to do it through Photoshop myself I’ll login to WordPress and create the post there. Any other time, however, I blog right from the best text editor out there, TextMate!

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