September, 2010

21
Sep 10

Use Notational Velocity, MacVim, WriteRoom, and Vimpress for the ultimate WordPress Blogging Workflow

My most recent post about Switching To Markdown got me started on a quest to find better tooling for writing, editing, and posting to fzysqr.com. As a .NET developer by trade, I have grown accustomed to one of the best development environments ever created (Visual Studio). After switching my home computing environment to OSX a few years ago, I haven’t been able to settle into a comfortable set of tooling for coding and blogging on my Mac. This causes me to go off on wild tangents every time I sit down at my Macbook Pro to try to be productive:

Me: I'll work on a new post for my blog.

(starts tapping away at the keyboard for a few minutes.)

Me: Ugh, it is such a pain to post and format code on WordPress. I'll just
    see if there is a better way.

(4 hours later)

Me: I've got it! Using these 10 new plugins and some custom python scripts 
    I found online, I now have the ultimate setup!

(Next day)

Me: Ugh, these custom scripts suck. There has to be a better way...

(repeat forever)

I am somewhere around iteration 50 in this hellish loop and I think I may have found a workflow worth keeping.

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10
Sep 10

Switching to Markdown

I am thirteen posts into my blogging career and I just discovered Markdown! As someone who writes html all day long for work, I find it strangely relieving to put away the angle brackets once and awhile (without resorting to yet another bad WYSIWYG editor). So there are going to be a few changes:

  • I am now writing my posts in Markdown
  • Using TextMate and the blogging bundle
  • I had to ditch the code syntax highlighting. (I haven’t found one that works with Markdown and WordPress)

The first two items are awesome. The third not so much. I would love to hear from anyone that has figured out a way to have their cake and eat it too.

So, if you see any garbled code on my old posts, please let me know and I will clean them up.

Thanks for reading!

10
Sep 10

ASP.NET MVC2 Plugin Architecture Tutorial Part 3

This is part 3 of a multi-part tutorial:

So here it is. Part 3. When I said coming soon, I meant it. Honest! But I had a busy summer. Really busy. I made a list:

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