New Technologies
Well, new to me technologies.
Like scads of other bloggers, I use a web interface for publishing my stuff. Moveable Type is a pretty good system and I’ve gotten very comfortable with the interface, but I really hate typing in an HTML form text area.
I’m a programmer and I use the vim editor. It’s simply awesome. I can do things to text in vim that would make an HTML form either cringe in fear, or slackjawed with awe. It’s that good. Gets me all tingly just thinking about.
World’s biggest dork point number two: sophisticated text editing programs get me hot. I gotta get therapy.
Anyway, it ocurred to me that MT supports the popular Blogger API for XML-RPC. In English, this means that an MT weblog can receive messages from any program that knows how to speak its language. You don’t have to use the interface that ships with it.
Mark Pilgrim has written an excellent implementation of the code needed to do this talking. It’s written in Python, a groovy little language that I use at work. And here’s the great part. I just discovered this week that you can compile vim with its own internal Python interpreter.
What all this means is that the technology for publishing my posts directly from my favorite editor exists. The only thing that I don’t yet know how to do is upload images. Hopefully MT provides a hook for this that I can add to Mark’s blogger API.
I love this stuff.
April 13th, 2003 at 12:24 am
I spend a certain percentage of time at work programming, and I use Vim too, and plain old vi when it’s not available. People at work think think it’s a little crazy, but they just don’t know vi well enough to appreciate it. Bash in vi mode is my preferred interface.
April 13th, 2003 at 12:27 am
P.S., new hat:
http://caught-thought.com/ct/archives/000115.html
April 14th, 2003 at 3:05 pm
Bash and vim are a great combo.
Have you worked much with vim scripting? I’m exploring it now to try and get the most out of vim’s built-in Python functionality. I’m very excited by the possibilities here.