WordPress, TextMate, and Markdown

For the past few weeks/months, I have been busy with many personal changes. First of all, I have been [engaged](http://www.flickr.com/photos/iceycake/3484346159/) with my finance and we are so busy to planning our big day next year. Secondly, there are a lot of major changes at work and I was exhausted when I got back to home. Finally, I am sick of [Ecto](http://illuminex.com/ecto/) after updated [Wordpress to 2.7.1](http://www.iceycake.com/2009/02/wordpress-271-is-out/).

I totally understand it is [not the fault](http://www.iceycake.com/2009/02/tutorial-fixing-wordpress-27-xml-rpc-issue/) of Ecto. However, I’m really too busy to redo the patch every time I updated WordPress. I’m a 99% Mac user and I use [TextMate](http://macromates.com/) for most of the non-Java programming. Why don’t I use [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) with TextMate for blogging? Since Markdown is using a syntax very closed to [MediaWiki](http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki), I should be able to pick up the syntax very quick.

I installed the [PHP Markdown Plugin](http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/) to my blog and tried a new workflow in this post:

1. Write the article using Markdown using TextMate
2. Post the article to WordPress using TextMate’s blogging bundle
3. In case needs to modify the post, use TextMate’s blogging bundle to retrieve and modify

The experience is great and nature. I don’t need to worry too much about HTML details.