[TxMt] Persistent Includes?

[csilver_junk at mac.com]

Hello,

I've been a lurking member of this list for some time, but this is my  
first attempt at posting. I've been trying out TextMate in demo mode  
and plan to buy it because it's nearly perfect for the way I work,  
but I have a couple questions I'm hoping somebody could clear up for me.

I'm not a programmer, so please forgive me if my questions seem  
somewhat elementary. I do, however, use the Terminal quite often for  
shell commands, and I understand PHP well enough to write code for my  
own purposes. I prefer coding my web pages by hand, and I'm fluent in  
XHTML and CSS and competent in XSLT. I'm a bit anal about clean  
coding, usability, and accessibility (both for the end user and for  
me when writing my pages). For these reasons among others, I've been  
disappointed by virtually all of the website generation applications  
and/or scripts I've tried. It seems they require lots of convoluted  
configuration that just gets in my way. Besides, I'd rather just do  
it all myself with flat text files, using scripting just to generate  
the headers, footers, navigation, etc.

I'm not necessarily concerned with TextMate's ability to do the many  
super-complicated things it obviously can do, as I probably won't use  
most of it myself. However, I'm wondering if it has a feature similar  
to the Persistent Includes available in BBEdit. I have examined the  
manual and read about how to use snippets, templates, commands, and  
the like, and I understand how these could be used to make my life  
easier. The problem is that I haven't figured out if there's a way to  
re-parse an entire project or certain files within a project after  
I've made changes that will affect the output.

For instance, if I've used a script to output links to all the files  
contained in the directory (as a navigation menu of sorts) but later  
add more files to that same directory, I'd like to be able to re- 
generate the entire site so that those new files show up in the menu.  
Likewise, if I've generated prev/next links to other files in the  
same directory, I'd like to have them updated without having to  
manually type the new hyperlinks into each and every file of the  
site. I know I could use PHP or server-side includes or something  
similar (and I have written a simple php function to do just that),  
but I'd really like to generate static web pages because having  
dynamic pages online really isn't necessary for what I'm doing (also,  
I can upload the same files both to .Mac and to my virtual host, for  
example).

If nothing resembling Persistent Includes is available in TextMate,  
another viable option would be to auto-generate the output of an  
entire project but save it to a new directory on my system using the  
same hierarchy of the original project. That way, I can simply re- 
generate it whenever I need to. In fact, that would probably be a  
simpler solution than the Persistent Includes idea, but of course you  
all probably know much more about how to efficiently accomplish this  
than I do. Also, if anyone could point me in the direction of a good  
streamlined tutorial on how to use shell scripts in an environment  
such as TextMate, perhaps I can figure it out on my own. The TextMate  
manual is nice, but something more tutorial-like would help a lot.

Sorry for the long post - it actually started out longer with more  
details about my background and what I do, but I figured people may  
get annoyed, so I cut it. If I need to further clarify exactly what I  
need to accomplish, please ask, but I suspect most of you are quite  
familiar with BBEdit and know about how Persistent Includes work and  
how they differ from regular Includes.

Thanks,

Crystal