How We Live-Blogged GMIC With TextMate

A few people have been asking about how we live-blogged the Global Mobile Internet Conference last week, so I thought I’d share a little. I toyed with TextMate Snippets last year and I thought that this GMIC live-blog might be another case where I could use it.

Spoilers: Here are the end results> Live-blog day 1 | Live-blog day 2

Here’s what I wanted to do starting out:

• Have anchor links (or Winerlinks) for each update, each with a unique timestamp
• Provide a ‘Tweet This’ option after quotable quotes

On day 1, I used the following TextMate Snippets (read: keyboard shortcuts that produce long reusable strings of text) to achieve those two requirements.

For the anchor links:

This string appears when I type ‘t+[TAB].’ Then when I type the timestamp in the ‘1:enumerate’ area, the other two instances of ‘$1’ are filled in simultaneously, and then I press [tab] to skip to the ‘$0’ placemark. Ta-da! Anchor links achievement unlocked!

Possible improvement: ISO time? Update: Improvement made! Now with ISO time automagically input. 🙂

For the ‘Tweet This’ link I type ‘w+[TAB]’ to insert the following string, which is just a Twitter status link tacked onto my anchor link snippet. When I write the live blog content (in the ‘2:enumerate’ area, it gets mirrored and types into the Twitter status link. Cool! Note that there’s another ‘$1’ at the end of the URL to link directly to the anchor tag. Now we can send the link to this particular live blog update to Twitter. (and the peasants rejoice!)

Yes, I had to determine our live-blog URL before it was actually published, but that’s easy enough. The problem here lies in having a Twitter status link that includes a Penn-Olson URL with hashtag. It just won’t work (i.e. paste it into the browser and it doesn’t fill out the Tweet for you).