I’ll be the first to admit that I get a little obsessed with projects that aren’t really going to improve my life all that much. Those projects can be fun to blog about, though, so I present you my brief obsession for this Sunday afternoon.

You may have noticed on this blog that some posts have header images, and some don’t, and that they get styled differently based on whether there’s an image or not. It pulls the header images from one of two places: the post thumbnail (which I can’t edit from MarsEdit) or the first image in the post content with a class of “headerimg”. As long as I’m blogging in MarsEdit (or TextMate for that matter), I’m stuck with the latter option. Because the whole header image deal is handled through PHP in my functions.php file, I can’t really preview how it’s going to look; rather, I get a header image stuck somewhere before, in or after my content. In TextMate, I have a little more “scriptability” at my disposal, and the previews I’ve created there are quite accurate. As far as I can tell, I can’t pre-process content before the template is generated, so I had to try something else… My solution, for now, is jQuery in the preview template. I load the jQuery library up top (inside the header) using Google’s Ajax API:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>google.load("jquery", "1.4");</script>

Then, at the bottom, I just start polling for an image with the right class to show up. I know it’s brute force, but this isn’t exactly public-facing, and it doesn’t seem to cause any hiccups in my writing. I have this right before my closing body tag:

<script>
function fixHeader() {
    if ($('img.headerimg').attr('src') != undefined) {
        headerImg = $('img.headerimg').removeClass('headerimg').remove();
        postThumb = $('.postthumb:first');
        headerImg.prependTo(postThumb);
        postThumb.addClass('hasimage').removeClass('noimage');
    }
}
setInterval(fixHeader,2000);
</script>

I’m sharing this just to toss the idea out there, not because I think there’s anyone else with the exact same template setup as mine.

In addition to having Javascript at my disposal, MarsEdit is also AppleScript-able. I haven’t looked very far into that yet, but I did whip up a quick script for adding the “headerimg” class to my images (because I always forget which class I assigned for this):

tell application "MarsEdit"
    set selectionContents to selected text of document 1
    set {astid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, "/>"}
    if selectionContents is not "" then
        set textToInsert to (text item 1 of selectionContents) & "class=\"headerimg\" />"
    end if
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid
    set selected text of document 1 to textToInsert
end tell

That lets me just select an image (or pending upload tag) and run the script to add the necessary class.

Related posts:

1. MultiMarkdown in MarsEdit
2. Instapaper Beyond for Safari
3. Marked scripts: nvALT, Evernote, MarsEdit, Scrivener

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Fun with MarsEdit, part I

I’ve just started using MarsEdit¹ again (in combination with my TextMate² blogging bundles), but I’ve run into a couple of issues. First, I can’t assign thumbnails to my posts directly. This is the result of poor API support in WordPress for handling attachments on a specific post, and not Daniel’s fault at all. Fortunately, I’ve set my blog up to search for an image with a specific class, remove it from the post and use it as the post header if a thumbnail isn’t assigned. That works.

Second, my blog uses PHP Markdown Extra³, and a lot of the “extra” functionality was messing up my carefully-crafted preview in MarsEdit. Fortunately, a little searching on the Red Sweater forums yielded exactly what I needed⁴: you can add your own text filters with a little editing and some luck.

Markdown Extra shares most of the functionality I need with MultiMarkdown⁵, such as footnotes and quick, semantic tables. By copying the bin folder from ~/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/ to ~/Application Support/MarsEdit/TextFilters/ and renaming it from bin to MultiMarkdown (the exact same name as the executable), I was able to add the text filter without breaking a sweat.

Now, between MarsEdit and Edit in TextMate, I can do all of my blogging in Markdown Extra, offline, with full previews. I can manage categories and tags, excerpts and add media. Spectacular.

Related posts:

1. Fun with MarsEdit, part I
2. Marked scripts: nvALT, Evernote, MarsEdit, Scrivener
3. The second Marked giveaway!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at MultiMarkdown in MarsEdit