With the newest [screencast][1] from the [TextMate Blog][2] about blogging from TextMate, I pretty much just fell in love with the simplicity of it. By default the plugin will create a blog post using Markdown. Markdown seems like a very interesting markup language. The general goal of this markup language is summed up pretty nicely over at [Daring Fireball][3]
>Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
TextMate has a great Markdown bundle as well for helping you out with writing it. If the idea of blogging from a text editor is appealing to you at all, I would recomend checking out TextMate and the Blogging bundle. I like it because it allows me to write a blog post without having to go to my website. It is also alot easier to compose blog entries to be finished later. I often find myself starting blog posts intending to finish them at a later point, only to forget about them or publish them before they are completed to my liking. It also allows me to blog while offline and publish when I have an internet connection.
The one main thing that has kept me from using an alternative blogging program to publish articles was the inability to tag the posts via [UTW][4] at the time of publishing. With the newest version of UTW it has an option to enable inline tags that are removed at publishing. Very cool.
[1]: http://macromates.com/screencasts “TextMate Screencasts”
[2]: http://macromates.com/blog/ ” TextMate Blog”
[3]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax “Markdown: Syntax”
[4]: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ “Ultimate Tag Warror 3″
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