Blogging with WordPress and TextMate

Since I lost a large post last week, I decided to at least use a real editor for my posts. Since TextMate has the lovely blogging bundle as shown by Allan Odgaard in a nifty screencast I gave that a try. However it was not plug and play™ as I hoped.

Here are my experiences:

Installation

• The Blogging Bundle Help says you should setup your blog as follows

  KnobsLeversButtons    
  http://pulleman@blog.pulleman.com/blog/xmlrpc.php

  I took that a bit too literal. This gave a 404. The actual URL is in my case a bit different. I changed this to:

  KnobsLeversButtons   
  
  http://pulleman@blog.pulleman.com/xmlrpc.php
  
  

  And it worked!

• Next problem I faced was the infamous date problem. Unfortunately WordPress 2.2.1 introduced a Z in the date format which breaks Ruby 1.8.2’s XML-RPC parser. Ruby 1.8.2 comes shipped with Tiger — so I needed to update the installed Ruby version. This is explained in WordPress Wiki.
  I updated Ruby to 1.8.4. I used this article for information about updating Ruby: Updating Ruby
• Now the system has to know where to find the Ruby version. If you type ruby --version and it says something different than 1.8.2, the new ruby is already on your path. If not, add the path to your ~/.bash_login. My path was /usr/local/bin. This is explained in Search Path.
  However I am not sure if this step is needed, because I later discovered that I used the wrong path and it still worked.
• Next I created the environment.plist as explained in Search Path. This was crucial in my case to get it working.

Observations

• I want my post to have the draft status, so I can look in WordPress if I like how it looks before posting. It took me some time before I found out that there is a status header. I just tried it and it got highlighted. It is just not there in the Headers command. If Brad Choate who maintains the Blogging Bundle adds that it would be even nicer. For now just type Status: draft and it will be marked as a draft by WordPress.
• I’m doing HTML. Why does WordPress.com not support Textile or Markdown? Especially since there is a markdown plugin That would be so much better.
• The TextMate preview functionality Rocks! And so does the image drag and drop.