In my last post I talked about blogging with TextMate without really explaining much about how you do it. So I thought I would take a few minutes to explain my experience using the blogging bundle. Let me start off by noting that I am no TextMate expert, and that they already have very detailed documentation available at their site, along with a wiki and some screencasts. However, you may find that it’s more technical that you might like, so I’ll just give you the basics as I understand them, and why I like the way the program works.

You have to set up the blog before you start using the bundle, which is pretty simple: you go to the “Bundles” menu. then choose “Blogging,” and click “Setup Blogs.” Then you get a screen that gives you an example URL, something like “admin@example.com/blog/xmlrpc.” For the first part, you enter your username, which for WordPress people like me is always “admin,” and the URL for the blog (for some reason WordPress seems to prefer that you use “www,” so you should include that). “xmlrpc” is the “endpoint,” meaning that you always use it when you are blogging from outside the dashboard you see online.

You can test if you have entered things correctly by going to “Blogging” again in “Bundles” and select “Fetch Posts.” If you see a list of your last twenty posts, you’re all set.

Here’s a look at that process:

Then, it’s pretty simple. You can start a post by selecting “File,” then “New from Template,” then “Blog Post.” You can select the platform you use–for WordPress users, it’s Markdown. Then, you type a title right after “Title.” You can type “Category,” then hit the tab key, and it will recognize your category entries. Similarly, you can type “Comments,” hit Tab, then type “On” or “Off” to turn comments on or off. This works with a bunch of headers (pings, tags) that you can find in the Blogging bundle. Use them if you find them useful, but if not, you don’t have to worry about them.

You can also drag and drop photos into your posts, and they will be uploaded to your server, and sized for the post.

I think TextMate is a great tool if you want to program or code on your Mac, or if you just want to learn a little more about how your blog works, while making the posting process a bit easier. The key bindings and other bundled functions make it easy to see what’s going on (and what you’re doing wrong), while neither confusing you nor obscuring the code.