Stephen Tudor

Until today, I’d never written a blog post before that wasn’t in the online editor window of the admin interface. That’s a bad idea for a couple of big reasons: you can’t save local copies of drafts without copying and pasting into a file; the server could lose its connection, drop your session, and your current writing along with it. Writing online can be a great convenience, but it’s also risky in that a lost connection could throw the baby out with the bath-water while you’re working on a particularly lengthy post, and all that hard work would be lost.

Those well-crafted turns of phrase? Gone. Those painstakingly sly aphorisms? They’re in the Internet’s ever-expanding /dev/null receptacle. As Murphy’s Law dictates, these sorts of situations tend to happen not just at the most inopportune moments you can imagine, but especially the ones you can’t.

Online blog editing was the whole of my blogging experience until today. Sure, I knew it wasn’t ideal, and I got bitten a few times by dropped sessions while editing a post, but that never prompted me to change my behavior or investigate any solutions to the issue. You win some, you lose some. It was good enough, I thought. I had heard from a many people in my lifetime that the best way to write is to write drafts. A crappy, yet uncensored, first draft to capture the energy of thought, followed by subsequent revisions to harness that energy and make it actually intelligible.

I’m not saying I’ll ever be a great (or even good) writer by starting to write drafts of blog posts, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. One critical component of my blogging process has to change, though: I have to abandon the online blog editor. Blogging through an online form just seems wrong anymore, not just for reliability’s sake, but for posterity’s sake too.

I’ve been a proponent of plain text for a couple of years, thanks mainly to Merlin Mann’s pontifications on the subject. Plain text is the best data format. It’s ubiquitous, and very nearly infinitely backwards- and forwards-compatible (aside from the difference in Windows/Unix newline characters). A ton of other data formats are built on top of plain text: HTML, XML, YAML, CSS, CSV, JSON… but plain text is the key. You can pretty much rest assured that your data will be accessible 50 years from now if you store it in plain text.

When it comes to editing plain text on the Mac environment (my platform of choice), TextMate sits on the top of the heap. For me, it’s a Swiss Army knife of editing anything. TextMate’s awesome bundle API makes it totally extensible. I do nearly all my web development work on TextMate (in combination with Terminal and Firefox/Firebug), so why not blogging too? TextMate does have a Blogging bundle.

After configuring it with this blog’s XML-RPC script, I was able to post new articles and edit existing blog posts in TextMate. On top of that, I can keep and maintain a local record of all of my drafts for future blog posts in plain text! This post was, in fact, written in and posted via XML-RPC with TextMate. Too easy.

I’m never going back if I can help it.