Writing Posts The Easy Way With TextExpander

[If you're reading this in via email or RSS, you'll have to click through to watch the video.]

I'm going to say it up front: this is a long screencast, even for me. It weighs in at about 14.5 minutes. The star of this show is TextExpander, but Textmate also wins the prize for best supporting application.

TextExpander is a system-wide application (Mac-only) that takes a few keystrokes and converts them into longer strings. For instance, you could type em1 and it would expand that to your email address or ws1 and have it convert that to your primary website.

That's cool enough, but in this video, we're going to take it a bit further. I'm going to show you how TextExpander can help you write blog posts by taking a lot of the hard work out of formatting your posts. Using these techniques is some of what allows me to publish posts as frequently as I do, and they come in even handier when you want to give somebody a guest post because you can give them some lean HTML to cut and copy rather than having to make them do the work to format it themselves.

I could have made three smaller videos but I'm hoping that seeing this in context will be better than having to watch three videos.

You might wonder why I don't write in a blog editor or directly into the Wordpress window. I've got two quick reasons that address those wonderings: 1) I've tested writing in a blog editor vs. writing in Textmate, and Textmate won (effectiveness-wise) and 2) I've lost enough posts and words through browser craziness to not trust the process.

I wanted to post this yesterday but the techno-gremlins were conspiring against me, so you might get two posts today.