If not, why not? A few quick Google queries didn’t turn anything up, but I haven’t really dug all that deeply. I just spoke to some of the Eclipse folks, and they didn’t know of any off the top of their heads. I’ll ask the Netbeans folks the same question when I speak with them next week, but in the meantime if you know of any please drop me a line.
Given that blog authoring tools – at least in the open source world – are not all that impressive, and that many developers are active bloggers, it seems like it’d be a great opportunity for a project.
Cote' says:
January 13, 2005 at 10:31 am
My off-the-cuff thinking of why those IDE's don't have blog authoring plug-ins is because:
(1.) the people who use them don't mind typing up straight HTML into blogger.com (or whatever they use). The people who use the IDE's (programmers), are, of course, the same people who code up plug-ins for them. So, since they don't see a problem, they're not taking the time to create a plug-in.
(2.) to me at least, the idea of doing my blogging in an IDE seems weird: IDE's are for coding, not content authoring. While I love the uber-editor that emacs is and would gladly "live in emacs" if it was possible, Eclipse is far, far from emacs. That thought is an aside to the general idea of this point however: IDE's aren't for blog editing. Conceptually (to me) it seems weird.
(3.) frankly, the plug-ins would probably suck. I've used some RSS plugins for Eclipse and tried out many other code-centric plugins, and they're usually more trouble when it comes to usability than they're worth.
sogrady says:
January 13, 2005 at 10:52 am
hey Coté, interesting feedback. taking them point by point.
1.) generally, i agree. but while i don't mind typing straight markup into MT, it's also not something i cherish. throw in the fact that i don't typically have spellcheck, etc, and it's not an ideal situation. but go further; it's be great, for example, to have IDE-style autocomplete for common links, etc.
2.) i guess it's different strokes to different folks. when i was more active in programming – Vis Studio, mostly – i didn't particularly like going back and forth between apps. an in-shell editor is something i would have liked quite a bit. but again, perhaps it's just me.
3.) could be, but of course i think it's primarily a function of interest and availability. i'd venture to guess that the reason that most of the RSS plugins suck is that no one cares, usually b/c they've already got something they're wedded to – be it bloglines, netnewswire, feeddemon, whatever. i don't think that's the case currently with authoring tools. quite the contrary – i think most people are doing just what you said – hand typing out HTML either directly into the editor, using notepad, or if they're on windows/mac using ecto, marsedit, w.bloggar or some such.
that leaves out a lot of Linux application developers.
Cote' says:
January 28, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Having said all that above awhile ago, I still agree with the base problem I think you were playing around with: we need better editing/writing support for weblogs.
One of my collab-think buddies is obbsessed with the notion of creating a universal edit app. It'd be something like Sidekick (that old TSR from way back when that would pop-up all the sudden in DOS) that would, essentially, provide a rich editor for whatever you needed:
* typing email
* typing comments (like this)
* typing blog posts
* etc.
The idea would be that this super-editor would give you a good editing expierience and export (via the clipboard if nothing else) to whatever software you were entering text into. Instead of me using an HTML textarea to type up this comment, I'd use the super-editor, and then just cut-n-paste into this field, exporting it to "MT-comment format".
As a developer, I tend to jump right from the problem to the implementation, so I might be mixing some thing up when more time needs to be spent understanding the problem…but you get the idea.
I'd love to work on such a thing…along with the 6 jillion other things I'd love to work on when days sudden have 60 hours in them ;>
sogrady says:
February 22, 2005 at 9:21 am
i would absolutely love to see that kind of uber-editor. i've always been sort of confused at how auto-complete as an IDE feature never made it into more client side applications. blogging in particular could really use that type of functionality – i'm sick of relinking to sites i link to all the time.