Just trying out here the interesting feature in TextMate that allows you to post and edit entries to your blog. I’ve never been super big on the ability to post to blogs from various places, but since I’ve been using TM quite a bit lately, I thought I’d give it a shot. Why now? Well, I’ve run into a couple of problems using the WordPress editor in Firefox on the Mac; there is some weirdness such that line breaks aren’t parsed correctly, so paragraphs end up running together. So, on with the test.
Configuration using the blogging help in TM is incredibly easy, and there are several templates for creating new blog entries in the new file menu. I chose the HTML template for this entry. Extended entry text space is provided below markup in the new document template, and you can enter keywords at the top of the document, including Title and Category for your post.
(The following is extended entry text from the template – just as a side note.)
Once you have posted the document, it launches the permanent link in your browser and repopulates the document with the Blog name, Post id, Date, Pings (On, Off), Comments (On, Off), Title, and your Categories. At this point you are in the mode that using the Fetch post command puts you in, and you can modify the post and re-post it to the blog (which is separate from Saving, which is reserved still for actually saving the document to your desktop). I have to admit it does provide a nice little way of posting and editing entries, and you are afforded many (all?) the luxuries of composing a document in TextMate.
The only danger that I see so far is that there doesn’t seem to be error checking if you happen to be brain-dead enough to change your post id – there is no confirmation for over-write from what I can tell. Also, when I tried to post this entry to a non-existent Category, there was no error, but there was no support for adding it inline.