Blogging from BBEdit again

A few days ago, I mentioned on Twitter that my last post was the first one I’ve written on and published from a Mac in over three years.1 I had switched to blogging from an iPad through a combination of Drafts and Shortcuts for a few reasons:

  1. I was trying to learn the best ways to use an iPad, and forcing myself to use it for blogging seemed like a good way to learn.
  2. My older son’s laptop had crapped out on him, and I gave him my MacBook Air as a stopgap until we got him a new computer.
  3. I was wondering if I’d ever use a Mac notebook again, as Apple was in the middle of a five-year period in which it seemed determined to ruin its most popular line of computers.

I’m going to write soon about how and why I decided to move back to the Mac for most of my work (the M1 is a big part of the story, of course, but not the whole story), but for now I want to go over how I’ve organized the tools I use for writing and publishing this blog from a Mac.

It starts with BBEdit, the Mac-assed text editor that has lots of great editing tools built in and, at least as important, allows you to build your own tools to extend it. Back when I was blogging regularly from BBEdit, I had written several scripts to make blogging easier. Over the past couple of weeks, I resurrected those scripts and added to them, stealing several ideas I used in Drafts and Shortcuts.

What I have now is a new and improved Blogging package that combines scripts written in Bash, Python, Perl, and AppleScript. The AppleScripts are all accessible from the Scripts menu (the one that looks like a scroll).

Blogging Scripts

These all add text to the document I’m working on.

Many of the scripts in the Blogging package are Text Filters. These are shell, Python, or Perl scripts that work on either the selected text or the entire document.

Blogging Text Filters

One of the things I don’t like about BBEdit’s package system is that scripts and text filters from the same package don’t appear together. Scripts are in the scripts menu (or palette), and text filters are in the Text▸Apply Text Filter menu (or palette). But Keyboard Maestro can handle that.

I created a Blogging macro group in Keyboard Maestro, with simple macros that select the various menu items from the Blogging package. The macros in this group appear in a KM palette whose appearance is toggled by ⌃⌥⌘B.

Blogging Palette

The items in the palette are grouped by function.

As I said, some of the scripts behind these commands are old ones that I just haven’t used in a while. Some have been rewritten in the past couple of weeks to make them cleaner or add feature. Some are brand new to account for the changes I made a couple of years ago to the blog’s internal organization. Many of the scripts, I think, would be of no use to anyone but me. I’ll write about those that may be more broadly useful after I’ve lived with them for a while and shaken out the bugs.


  1. This was the last post from a Mac until a few days ago.