Hunting The Muse

Well, this is the

Well, this is the maiden voyage of a tiny new project I think I just completed. One of my goals for this year was to be able to work a little more on Real Writing. I don't really care what form the Real Writing is in, it's just to exercise my muscles a little bit more. Maybe to work towards becoming a columnist, maybe a creative writer, I don't know.

One of the things that has bugged me about blogging is the silly little tools. I can blog through AIM but it has a really small character limit - anything over two paragraphs and the rest of my text gets cut off. Then I have to go to the actual blogger.com interface, which is typing things into a large form "textarea" box, which I hate.

Neither of these things has any sort of real editing capabilities. And that bugs me.

The other thing I wanted to start working on again is my hacking muscles. Just a bit of learning there, a bit of perl hacking there, a bit of extra technical creativity everywhere.

So I just spent a few minutes and I finally wrote my "instablog" utility. And I figured out how to integrate it with vim, and automatically journal it. What does this mean? It means that at any time I want to write a longer blog, I can open up my terminal window, type "blog", and a vim window will open, with all its wonderful tools. Windowing, escape mode, the ability to capture complete lines or sentences, multiple-level undo, spell-check, whatever. I write so much more faster this way because I don't have to use the frigging mouse, and EVERYTHING is out of the way. And then when I'm done, I just hit ZZ (or :wq, which is how everyone else seems to do it), and it automatically gets posted here.

No browsing to web-based tools, no length restrictions (well, there's 65,000 characters, but I won't get there in one entry), no silly textarea box frustrations, and I can edit my writing to my heart's content before I send it off. AND, if I see an error, I can just simply edit the text file in vi, click save again, and it will automatically update that particular blog entry by ID number.

Yay me! It seems to work! At least, I think so. I haven't clicked save yet. Here goes! Posted by Curt at January 23, 2002 12:21 AM