While composing a blog entry today (which was subsequently eaten by a Safari crash, despite Saft valiantly saving my tabs), I became frustrated by the difficulty of putting screenshots and text together into a simple blog post.
So, here’s my idea: Someone needs to write a blog editor, similar to MarsEdit or ecto, that supports simple HTML, graphical tables and image insertion.
Let’s see what current OS X frameworks and applications can do in this vein:
- TextEdit can export HTML and has a decent table creation interface, but chokes on saving images into its HTML, opting for a “Web Archive” file instead. These Web Archives aren’t packages as I originally thought; they contain their images inline in the file, relying on a file:///myimage.tiff URL scheme to refer to them.
- Safari now supports the contentEditable property on objects, but requires quite a bit of JavaScript to fill in the cracks make it into anything useful.
- Mail.app somehow exploits Safari’s contentEditable system to create a decent-yet-buggy rich text editing environment. This might be the closest thing to what I’m looking for. I wonder if the framework is documented anywhere, or … heh … how many hacks they had to use besides implementing contentEditable in WebKit?
Maybe a better solution would be to create a WordPress plugin to which one can upload a Web Archive and automatically create a post, saving the embedded images out into a unique directory keyed to the post slug. I thought of saving the images right into the database, but that would lock the user into using the plugin forever. It’s not good practice to store data in a non-standard way.
Since writing the previous paragraphs, I’ve found out about textutil, which you can run web archives through to convert them to plain old HTML and JPGs (if images are in the archive). Why not create an AppleScript Studio app that uses XML-RPC and textutil to simply allow the user to utilize the existing OS X rich text editing environment (like in TextEdit), and upload a post to WP.
Better yet, how about just making rich text editing a feature of the next version of MarsEdit or ecto? Brent? Adriaan? Are you listening? 
(Remember, I paid for MarsEdit and donated for Kung-Tunes.) Seems like I heard something about that in plans for one or the other of those two.
Update: I haven’t played with ecto in a while, it seems. ecto supports rich text editing, but not with inline images. Gotta have those inline images. No reason not to. TextEdit does it. C’mon.
04/08/2005 at August 4, 2005 @ 1:26am Permalink
Actually, you can use inline images fine in ecto’ Rich Text editor. It just uploads them to server once you post the entry.
04/08/2005 at August 4, 2005 @ 7:22am Permalink
Okay, I look really silly now. ecto has become really really cool since I used it in version 1. That’s almost exactly what I’m asking for.
The reason I didn’t think it did inline images was that I tried to paste an image off the clipboard, and it didn’t do anything. Fix that, and I’ll buy. I might buy anyway.
Maybe you could have pasted images be converted to JPG/GIF/PNG based on either a sheet that comes down and lets you choose the format (odd and modal), or a preference: - Use PNG format for pasted images - Use JPG/GIF format (will automatically choose based on image content)
04/08/2005 at August 4, 2005 @ 7:29am Permalink
Sure, pasting images can go in there too. What you can already do is dragging images in there. Not only files, but also, say, GraphicConverter selected areas or from the browser.
04/08/2005 at August 4, 2005 @ 7:33am Permalink
I tried to take a screenshot (Cmd-shift-4) to the clipboard (holding down ctrl), and that wouldn’t paste. That’d be the ultimate.
Also, you’re really on the ball, commenting that quick to my original post. Kudos.
10/08/2005 at August 10, 2005 @ 7:37am Permalink
In case you missed it: http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/archives/001445.php
10/08/2005 at August 10, 2005 @ 7:45am Permalink
Sweet! I downloaded the build and played with the feature. Very nice; I’m impressed.