Naturally, the first thing I did after getting Octopress up, running, and actually deployed to a real live server was set up a writing workflow that will make it easy to post to this blog. And by “easy”, I of course mean “weird and convoluted, but in a way that makes sense to me”. What else would I mean?

The first ingredient in my workflow is tmux. If you haven’t played with it yet you’ll find that it’s a fast and easy way to access your project from multiple angles. You’ll have one terminal window open and in that one window you can be editing a file, keeping an eye on top and running your build tasks all at once, while a second tab has your development server running in it. I discovered tmux using Brian Hogan’s amazing book and haven’t looked back.

The second part of the recipe here is tmuxinator, a nice little ruby app that lets you set up tmux layouts in YAML instead of writing the commands out as actual tmux commands, like so:

You can see I have rake preview and top running on a “background” tab, so I can preview the site, and vim running on the first tab with a couple of regular old zsh panes at the project root and at the _posts directory, so I can issue other commands to the system and use Marked.app to preview my posts, etc. etc.

Obviously I haven’t been using this particular setup for all that long yet, but it’s got a lot of promise. I’m pleased with how it’s turning out.