Using the bundle with the TextMate 2 alpha

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Brett

The Blogsmith Bundle appears to be working with the new TextMate 2 alpha, but the bundle has to be manually installed in a somewhat unusual location to get it to show up:

~/Library/Application Support/Avian/Pristine Copy/Bundles

“~” is your user’s home folder. Your original copy of the bundle may be in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Blogsmith Blogging.tmbundle or in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Pristine Copy/Bundles/Blogsmith Blogging.tmbundle, depending on a few variables. Check .../TextMate/Bundles first, and try .../TextMate/Pristine Copy/Bundles if it’s not there.

Copy the whole .tmbundle to ~/Library/Application Support/Avian/Pristine Copy/Bundles and it should show up for you. I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly test all of the features yet, but if I find anything broken I’ll update this post.

[Update]: There actually are a few quirks to work around. I’m in the process of cleaning them up and making a TM2 version of the bundle. Nothing major, but be aware that switching to TM2 before the new bundle is finished could cause some issues in your workflow. I estimate I’ll have it done before Jan 1, 2012, but things can go wrong…

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A brief overview of TextMate’s Bundle Editor

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Brett

TextMate’s built-in Bundle Editor can be a valuable tool for exploring and learning about a bundle. This video shows how to use the Bundle Editor to view your bundles, their commands and snippets, and their menus and triggers (shortcuts).

You’ll be able to see how the bundle is constructed, and get just enough information about bundle modification to be dangerous (as well as learn why it’s not really dangerous).

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A Very Brief TextMate Tour

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Mike Rose

This is, as noted, a very brief tour of the goodness that is TextMate.

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Using the Tabs to References (Safari) command to collect links

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Mike Rose

Getting the links over here into the post over there has always been something of a blogging chore. Not anymore; the bundle makes it easy. Simply open a Safari (or Chrome or Firefox, but there you’ll need a separate extension to copy the tabs) window and get all your necessary links into tabs in the frontmost window. Dash back to TextMate, hit the trusty ^⌘w and choose Tabs to References (Safari). In the heads-up display, select the tabs you really want to include (use shift or command to batch-select), and when you’re all set hit OK.

The reference list pops in at the top of your post; to use them, simply highlight your target text, trigger the menu and choose Link to Reference.

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Autofill in 15 seconds or less

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Mike Rose

One of the truly magical (and essential!) parts of the bundle is the Copy for Posting command. This converts your Markdown-formatted post to clean, Blogsmith-friendly HTML and stashes it on the clipboard for you to paste into source view in Blogsmith. Nice and easy — but wait, there’s more!

Suppose you could have that Copy for Posting command automatically fill in your categories, tags and source link… your continued copy… even your image… now how cool would that be? It’s easy enough with the Autofill option, a very clever hack to get around the lack of a coherent remote posting API in Blogsmith. Here’s how it works:

  • Make sure your Web Sharing option is turned on in System Preferences. As long as you haven’t changed your default web index path, this should work as-is.
  • Get the Autofill bookmarklet here (or use the Safari extension, available on the same page)
  • When you’re ready to post, trigger the Copy for Posting (Autofill) from the ^⌘w bundle menu
  • In your browser, create a new draft post in Blogsmith
  • Hit your Autofill bookmarklet

Boom!

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Linking to past posts & tags

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Mike Rose

We love to provide deep links into our past post library when writing; it helps the reader gain context while reminding folks that we’ve been around for a good long while. Although you could spend time digging around in your search engine of choice to find the relevant post to link (don’t even get me started on our backend search), why not take advantage of the savvy search built into the bundle to make it easier and faster? Just highlight the relevant text, hit the ^⌘w command key and choose Link Blog Post. As you’ll see in the video below, the same technique works for tag-linking as well.

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Macros for working with Markdown lists in TextMate

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Brett

Download the Macros

As a supplement to the Blogsmith Bundle, you may wish to install two Macros for working with lists. They’re simple keystroke recordings which will allow you to move Markdown list items up and down using the Control key and the up and down arrows. Indenting and outdenting are already part of the Markdown bundle (using Control-Right and Control-Left, respectively), so these two addons allow for complete list item management with Control-Arrow keys.

Warning: this movie has a sountrack. Turn your speakers down. I’m serious.

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Working with images

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Brett

The Blogsmith Bundle can make getting images into your post a cinch. Once your images are cropped and sized, just drag them into your post in TextMate and you’ll be offered the option of inserting a temporary placeholder image or actually uploading the image to the Blogsmith CDN and getting back the tag needed to display it in the final post.

See below the video for a full transcript, including step by step instructions for setting up image uploading in your TextMate install.

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Extracting URLs from text

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Brett

Paste Reference Links (^⌘w-7) is a flexible command that will take the contents of your clipboard and turn any links it finds into reference links. If run on selected text, it will remove duplicates, sort and rename as necessary to give you a clean block of reference links. It will even insert links in your text if you run it on a selection in the middle of a paragraph, offering a popup menu if there is more than one link in your clipboard.

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Updating categories

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Brett

On occasion you may want to update the category listing used in the Categories HUD that comes up when using the categories: tab trigger in the headers. These are not pulled live from Blogsmith, so if new categories are added and you don’t feel like waiting for the Bundle to update, follow these instructions.

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