With the popularity of WordPress and other Content Management Systems (CMS) that incorporate What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors, such as TinyMCE and auto-saving, writing in separate editors seems a bit unnecessary or "old school". However, I still often prefer to work remotely, which sometimes means no Internet and makes TextMate a perfect offline utility. This task will cover a few of the more useful blogging bundles: Blogging and Hyperlink Helper.
The Hyperlink Helper option:
The Wrap selection with link option: Wrap a hyperlink tag no matter what kind of document you're in (HTML, Markdown, Textile, and so on) by using Control + Shift + L or from the menu by selecting Bundles | Hyperlink Helper | Wrap selection as link.
Search for selection and wrap with link: Use the keyboard shortcut Command + Control + Shift + L (or select Bundles | Hyperlink Helper | Lookup word on Google and link) to search for the selected text and wrap that text with the first result from Google.
The Blogging option:
The Setup option: First you must define your list of blogs by entering the blog name and XML-RPC (that is, Remote Procedure Call using XML) URL. From the menu select Bundles | Blogging | Setup. This is shown in the following screenshot:
Fetching blogs: In order to start editing blog posts, you'll need to fetch a list of the blog entries. From the menu select Bundles | Blogging | Fetch Post. The Fetch Post window is shown in the next screenshot.
The most common XML-RPC locations are as follows:
Moveable Type:
http://username@myblogdomain.com/mt-xmlrpc.cgi#1WordPress:
http://username@myblogdomain.com/xmlrpc.phpTypo:
http://username@myblogdomain.com/backend/xmlrpc
Edit and save the blog: Edit the blog entry in Markdown (see the Markdown and Textile section later in this chapter) and save blog as you normally would (Command + S). Once you're done editing, post to the blog with the keyboard shortcut Command + Control + P (or select Bundles | Blogging | Post to Blog).
The Hyperlink Helper option is quite useful when you want to quickly insert references into your documents without having to go back and forth between your browser, search for the address, and then paste it into your document.
It also has some further functionality, such as searching for word definition links in Wikipedia and more advanced Yahoo! search engine searches.
The Help documentation for the Blogging bundle is quite helpful, so you should read it if you have any issues. From the menu select Bundles | Blogging | Help.
