Goodbye to Dreamweaver, Goodbye to WYSIWYG

I’ve started to use a combination of WordPress quick tags, my Ultimate Tag Warrior autotag mod and TextMate with some custom modifications to do my Wordpress blogging. It took some hacking, but I’m 100% sold on the TextMate way of blogging now. I’ve even got it hacked so that when you drag an image from the finder onto the screen, it creates a thumbnail and gives you the option of showing the image, the thumbnail or the thumb linked to the image. Right now I’m basically working on taking all of the functionality I had hacked into my quicktags and bringing it into TextMate.

The code for the mod is available here for brave souls who’d like to try it. It needs to go in “Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle/Support/lib/blogging.rb”. This was my first foray into Ruby, so the syntax is a little new to me. And you have to have ImageMagick/GraphicMagick and RMagick for Ruby installed to use the thumbnailer. I should also mention that it’s only completely functional in the HTML templates, I’ve got to learn Mardown and Textile tomorrow… at least enough to put the links together.

I’m working on a series detailing my adventures and attempting to share all that I’ve learned in the process of switching not only my blog, but my entire web development platform over to TextMate, Transmit and OSX.

I’ll detail how to make the tags in TextMate even more XHTML standards compliant, how to hack the bundles to bend to your will, how to install RMagick and get the thumbnails working, and how to set up a full development suite for less than $150 (that kicks Dreamweaver’s butt).

I’ll leave you with two tips to kick it off:

In TextMate, edit the Wrap Selection as Link command and add title="${2:${TM_SELECTED_TEXT:Link text...}}" before the closing bracket of the first half of the tag. That will add the selected text as the title for the link (standards compliant) but highlight it as a tab stop after it runs the command so you can immediately type something else if you want to.

When you’re blogging with Wordpress and TextMate, add Status: Draft to your template header. This will keep the article from immediately publishing and give you a chance to log on and use your awesome Autotag mod for Ultimate Tag Warrior. As nice as the editing features of TextMate are, you’ll still appreciate choosing categories and tags online, directly from your database.

That’s all for today, but I’ve got pages of notes to share, so stay tuned.

AutoTag» blogging» hacks» osx» quicktags» standards» textmate» wordpress»