movement, movement

I’ve kept up to date with Randy’s blog on which he often does a “Web App Wednesday” post that never fails to bring attention to some truly great applications. One of Randy’s posts in the last month was dedicated to a blogging program called MarsEdit, labeled as “Write, preview, and publish without a web browser.” He also did a post on TextMate – one of the best text editor programs I’ve ever found and currently the program we use for all our Flash Development at my work.

The purpose of this post is to point out a connection between those two programs – and mention a recent feature that we discovered while using TextMate at work. That is – that TextMate is so versatile that you can actually post blogs from it.

Perhaps this is where it gets way too technical for some (almost including me) but TextMate’s expandability is based on what it calls bundles. And actually, you need not proceed in reading this post unless you’re use to looking at text in HTML format and able to do all such blogging by hardcoding your tags.

TextMate’s Blogging bundle has you register your blogs in a simple text file and once entered you can perform many of the functions built into most blogs. After writing a post in TextMate, simply pull up the Blogging bundle and select “Post To Blog”, select the blog (if you have registered several) and let TextMate take care of the rest.

Blogging in programs like TextMate or MarsEdit really comes in handy when bloggers get really picky about keeping records of their blogs in more places than just online, and have a thought through structure for the media files they upload. (I keep all my text, images, and xml-backups in a hierarchical directory structure on the two computers I use daily) It also comes in handy because composing a blog in a text editor other than the built in WordPress (or whatever blog software you use) can be very efficient and safe and sometimes the only option when you lack a connection to the internet.

Very handy, especially for someone like me who spends most of my day on TextMate anyway. Sorry to inform you non-TextMate-people, but it does cost a small sum for licensing. But take it from me, a guy who writes code for a living, you won’t find a better text editor for OSX out there.