HeySage

On a recent episode of The MacRoundtable Ray Slakinski, founder of PopCurrent, mentioned a wonderful blog publishing plugin for TextMate called BlogMate. BlogMate is a free, graphical plug-in for TextMate that allows creating and editing blog posts for some types of blogs (Wordpress most certainly) from a floating palette within TextMate. BlogMate is developed by Todd Ditchendorf.”

Now for the review. The Sage was able to download the plugin, install it, configure it, and publish a post with it in just a few minutes. As previously stated the plugin offers a free floating palette and has a very straightforward UI. Once configured any open HTML or Markdown document can be published by simply clicking the “Send Post” button in the BlogMate pane. This will bring up a dialog box which prompts you for the title of the post and allows you to configure the time stamp. To set the category of the posting, all you need to do is check the Categories that apply in the Categories pane of the BlogMate window.

The only downside The Sage could find is that the uploading of images or other media is not streamlined as it is when using the TextMate blogging bundle. When using the TextMate blogging bundle the image is uploaded to the location specified by the user in the WP-Admin configuration panel and the appropriate link (in HTML or Markdown) appears in the text so that when you post, the image will display properly. When using BlogMate you must manually upload the image.

The Sage found a simple work around so as to get the best of both worlds. All you need to do is create a document from the blogging bundle template and then remove the “Title:” text at the head of the document. Then you can post the document using BlogMate. This is currently The Sage’s preferred method of posting although he may choose to incorporate MarsEdit in his future work flow.

All in all, BlogMate offers a free, quick and easy way to post to a supported blog using TextMate.

Technorati Tags: BlogMate, TextMate, Bloggin Tools