Sunday 18 November 2007

Local Editing

I was never entirely happy with using the Blogger editing box in a web browser for an entire, long post. It's in a browser, where the slightest click or accidental action could cause the post to be lost. Plus, all my blog posts are now stored on Google's server. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my work to be on my computer.

Plus, I'm an Emacs user, I want to edit my work in that editor/operating system/religion. Call me very old-fashioned...
Well, I've finally found a solution. The blog editing software from Red Sweater, MarsEdit, will quite happily deal with blogs on Blogger: downloading old posts and uploading new ones, unlilke some other blogging clients I've tried.

Though it has the ability to launch other editors, like TextMate, to edit posts this does not work immediately with Emacs. MarsEdit doesn't ever notice that Emacs eventually closes the file. The MarsEdit developer was very helpful. He pointed me to a page describing what MarsEdit is waiting for, and after a bit of Cocoa hacking I can now edit my posts in Emacs. Woohoo!

Well, that's assuming this post appears OK...

And as an aside, I'm pretty impressed with Xcode 3.0. It's got some pretty nice features: the purtiest were these colourful labels that appear directly in your source marking compiler errors and warnings.

Any way, assuming this appears correctly, I'll be buying MarsEdit, switching to that for blogging, and you should see a lot more posts out of me in the future.

1 comment:

Daniel Jalkut said...

If your Emacs hack is working, maybe you can share it? I know at least one other Emacs fan who also uses MarsEdit, and he might appreciate this!

Daniel