Ever since I started blogging, I have been using different tools to help me do my thing.
At first, I was using the browser to directly write the articles in the MT interface, but after losing a significant amount of text that way, I quickly migrated to writing my entries in a text editor (jEdit back then) and pasting them into the MT interface.
Then I learned about the XML-RPC interface to MT and began using w.bloggar to do my writing, but stagnation and little quirks made me to back to a real text editor which is what I was using for a long time (though I migrated from MT to s9y in between).
Last year, I caught the buzz about Windows Live Writer, which was kind of nice, but generally, I need more freedom in writing HTML than what a WYSIWYG editor can provide me with – especially as I have my special CSS rules for code for example that I prefer to just manually setting the font.
So I was back to the text editor (which went from jEdit to TextMate in between).
And then I noticed the blogging bundle.
The blogging bundle for TextMate allows me to keep writing my blog entries in the tool of choice, while being able to post the finished entries direct from within TextMate.
Basically, you configure some basic settings for your blogs and then you write a colon-separated list of values at the beginning of the document which TextMate uses to post your entry.
It can fetch categories, configure pings and comments, set tags – whatever you want. Directly from your editor where you are doing your writing. Of course you can also fetch older postings and edit them.
So this provides me with the best of both worlds: Direct posting to the blog with one key press (Ctrl-Command-P) while writing in the editor of my choice that is very stable and provides me with the maximum flexibility at laying out my articles.
I love it.
gnegg 