Better, faster and cheaper in time and effort: Software for managing the weblogging workflow

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Robbie Paplin has a new weblog and he writes there and at Rain City Guide about the Deep Geek thinking underlying his decision-making process in selecting his new blogging platform. Very interesting reading.

I spent my junk time yesterday doing fussy CSS tweaks on Teri Lussier’s weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. This is a hugely frustrating iterative process: Make one minor edit, FTP it to the file server, refresh the page, discover that the change was a mistake, undo, redo, repeat, express frustration in a way that does not exacerbate male pattern baldness.

HTML is hugely forgiving, which is not really a good thing. Web developers have worked for years with multiple computing platforms, each one home to multiple versions of multiple web browsers, all so they could see how their code would be interpreted in an array of hardware and software environments. Not cool.

But: CSS is hugely unforgiving, as crotchety and irascible as a compiled computer language — without the error messages. I was starting with a style sheet created by someone else and trying to torque it into doing what I wanted done. The worst part about making a change in CSS is not seeing that the change you made is wrong, but that the change you made changed nothing. If the original CSS was improperly formatted, the results you’re seeing on the screen are actually inherited from somewhere else. Nice.

I don’t do this for a living, not alone because there are laws against homicide. But I do have good tools, and it’s worthwhile to talk about what good tools can do to make work like this work easier if not actually easy. I live in the Mac world, so, if you’re stuck with Windows, you’ll have to translate. We’re talking about categories of tools, so this stuff exists on both platforms.

For editing, I use TextWrangler, a free programmer’s editor from BareBones Software. I use this for everything, writing, editing, coding — everything. I’ve been using BareBones editors since 1991 or so. Someday I’ll pop for the for-pay product. There is so little HTML in a weblog post, you might as well learn to code it directly, rather than trusting a WYSIWYG editor. And as Jim Cronin says, Microsoft Word sucks.

To post to WordPress, I use Ecto, which is available for both the Macintosh and Windows. Ecto supports multiple accounts on multiple weblogs, inheriting your categories and saving and encoding your Technorati tags. My production line is TextWrangler to draft, Ecto to preview and polish, then WordPress. This is much faster than editing directly in WordPress.

For FTP, I use Fetch, which I’ve been using since the late 1980s or so. There are other Mac FTP clients, but Fetch is familiar to me, and it permits me to do all kinds of insane stunts. The current version of Fetch comes with Droplets, little AppleScript mini-clients you can put anywhere. So, for example, in my local folder for Teri’s theme, I have a droplet that connects directly to the corresponding folder on the TheBrickRanch.com file server. When I make a change to the style sheet or another theme file, I just drag and drop it onto the Droplet and it uploads it automatically to the file server. If you think about how many file servers we work in, and how many of us working in those file servers are not me, you can see the benefit of having a Fetch Droplet in each folder we’re working from.

In his post, Robbie mentions image uploads. I’ve never messed with that feature in WordPress. I just upload photos directly in Fetch (I have a Droplet in my Dock), then code for them in TextWrangler. We use a piece of keyboard macro software called TextExpander for much of our HTML coding. (I used to QuickKeys, but the price kept going up and my needs kept going down.) To code an ordinary link, Cathy can go to the page she wants to link to, copy the URL, then type “href” into her TextWrangler document. That will explode into the fully-coded link with the cursor flashing between the angle-brackets, ready for her to type in the linking text. If she copies the name of a photo, she can type “_p” and get a fully-coded image tag. Software like TextExpander saves time and eliminates errors.

For photos, I use PhotoShop, which is probably not such useful advice. It’s outrageously powerful, but it’s also outrageously expensive. It ships with an add-on called ImageReady, which might be enough for most weblogging applications. ImageReady supports Droplets, also, so I can take photos from all over the place and scale them to exactly 468 pixels wide, the width of a BloodhoundBlog photo. This is all done by drag and drop, and I can upload the finished photos by dragging and dropping them onto my Fetch droplet. If I built a smart folder on the Mac, I could automate the entire process: Drop the original photos into the smart folder and I’m done.

There’s more, no doubt. I do this stuff kinesthetically, with my hands, so I’m sure I’m forgetting something. The important tool, in any task, is between your ears. I worked for a lot of years managing production flows, and my mind turns toward automating and simplifying repetitive, error-prone tasks. As an example, if you’re building code that will have a lot of repeated elements, build all those first, with dummy text (I like “xx”) as placeholders for the unique copy. Then use search to go back and change all the placeholders to the unique copy. That might be obvious, but if you play with search-and-replace in a really good programmer’s editor, you’ll find all sorts of ways to convert what you have to what you want without having to type like a dervish. Like this: If you have a list of photos, you should have a list of HTML-coded image tags in two searches — one if you learn how to grep. I code the plain text from my weekly Republic column in one search and two manual edits, literally seconds of effort.

You don’t need a Macintosh for this (although real work is much easier in the Mac world), and you don’t need to spend a lot of money (although judicious investments do pay off). What you need, more than anything, is a readiness to take a long, hard look at anything you are doing that is repetitive, tedious, boring. Some things you’re stuck with. There is no automated way to write. But many of the things you are doing right now by hand — one painful, error-prone iteration at a time — can be streamlined, simplified, automated — made better, faster and cheaper in time and effort. And there is nothing wrong in that…

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