As faithful readers of my blog already know, I use Blosxom as my blogging software. Thanks to the gracious hosting offered by my friend Richard, my blog resides behind a firewall and my only access to it is via a VPN.

In some ways I'm kind of old-school when it comes to maintaining my personal web site (my favorite editor is vi), but I'm also fairly new-century too, what with my preference for "all things Mac". Sometimes I straddle an uneasy fence... I don't use "xv" to manage my photo library, and I don't use "mutt" to read my email (thanks, iPhoto.app and Mail.app!). But I also can't stand the clumsy FTP clients on the Mac like Transmit and what not.

It's simple enough for me to break out ftp (1):

% ftp www.khan.org
Connected to www.khan.org.
220 XxFtpd FTP Server
Name:
331 Password required.
Password:
230 User logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> |

Now I need to create the files locally, then transfer them over.

So, sometimes, I simply prefer to log into the server and edit the files locally.

% ssh www.khan.org
...
$ vi .blog/coda.txt

Coda might just change all that. True, it isn't vim-like, but what it does do fairly transparently is to make editing remote blog entries on the server painless. No local text files to write and publish, no shells to open to the remote host to edit with screwed up termcap entries (which apparently get bungled up by either Terminal.app or by my Unix shell on the remote box-- I don't care, mostly because I shouldn't have to).

If you haven't heard about it yet, check it out. If it's good enough to make me consider leaving vi behind because of its other conveniences, it might be worth looking at.