It makes me feel like my code is more beautiful, somehow.

Maybe it’s because whenever I watch a brilliant hacker give a technical talk, they put their screens up on the projector and live-code with super-large type.

Perhaps it reduces the amount of stuff that fits on my screen to a more elegant “that which matters.” Too much text via smaller font makes it difficult to focus.

It’s a cognitive hack for creativity.

Monoco 18pt – Vibrant Ink color scheme for Textmate

Through the TextMate bundle framework, you get some nice collating of contexts, etc.

GTDAlt does rely on some proprietary syntax, but it’s pretty basic and easily parsable.

There is rudimentary support for iterating through items in an inbox.txt file to generate GTD items.

I created an applescript which will take the selected message in Mail.app and create a properly formated item, using the subject and message: url (you must have MailTags installed so the message: protocol is recognized).

This means I’ll get action items with links to specific messages in my GTD system.

I partner this with a Mail Act-On rule… so when I hit ctrl-1, a GTDAlt item gets created, the message is tagged “@action”, and it’s sent to my one archive folder in one step.

In true GTD fashion, this should only be used for messages that take longer than 2 minutes to respond to. In reality, I need to get better at firing off quick responses to things (or liberally using the delete key). Otherwise, it’s likely I’ll use this to just procrastinate email items away into a black hole.

Download the script

I want to hack the textmate blogging bundle to do a full download of all posts in a blog and save those posts to local disk.

First, I just hacked the bundle to allow user to fetch any post from the blog.

Note: This is a slow hack and should only sparingly be used.

Knud M√∂ller talks about using XMLRPC to get all posts from a blog. I opted to use the “number of post requests is ridiculously large” approach. Mephisto implements the GetRecentPost call with a limit indicating number of posts to retrieve, so it’s still only one database hit (but creates a whole lot more objects in memory).

/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle/Support/lib/blogging.rb

def fetch
   begin
     # Makes sure endpoint is determined and elements are parsed
     current_password = self.password
     require "#{ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH']}/lib/progress.rb"
     result = nil
     TextMate.call_with_progress(:title => "Fetch Post", :message => "Contacting Server “#{@host}”…") do
       result = self.client.getRecentPosts(self.blog_id, self.username, current_password, 100000) # HERE IS WHERE YOU SPECIFY NUMBER OF POSTS TO RETRIEVE
     end
     if !result || !result.length
       TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("No posts are available!")
     end
     @mw_success = true
     if self.post = select_post(result)
       TextMate.exit_create_new_document(post_to_document())
     else
       TextMate.exit_discard
     end
   rescue XMLRPC::FaultException => e
     TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("Error retrieving posts. Check your configuration and try again.")
   end
end

This works fine. Next up:

• Create a separate command for Fetch latest 20 and Fetch All
• Create command to “create index listing”
• Create command to “Fetch All Posts and then save each post to separate file in specified directory”

I just started using the textmate blog editing bundle by Brad Choate to update this blog.

I watched a screencast that convinced me.

I’m liking it quite a lot… Working solely in text with markdown is somewhat liberating. I think with some good quicksilver-foo, it would make for some fun blogging workflow.

Furthermore, I can then keep local versions of all my blog posts as subversion-friendly text.

I’d like to work on hacking into the bundle to grab a full backup in text-friendly format.