Here are my experiences:

Installation

• The Blogging Bundle Help says you should setup your blog as follows

  KnobsLeversButtons    
  
  http://pulleman@blog.pulleman.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
  
  

  I took that a bit too literal. This gave a 404. The actual URL is in my case a bit different. I changed this to:

  KnobsLeversButtons   
  
  http://pulleman@blog.pulleman.com/xmlrpc.php
  
  

  And it worked!

• Next problem I faced was the infamous date problem. Unfortunately WordPress 2.2.1 introduced a Z in the date format which breaks Ruby 1.8.2’s XML-RPC parser. Ruby 1.8.2 comes shipped with Tiger — so I needed to update the installed Ruby version. This is explained in WordPress Wiki.
  I updated Ruby to 1.8.4. I used this article for information about updating Ruby: Updating Ruby
• Now the system has to know where to find the Ruby version. If you type ruby --version and it says something different than 1.8.2, the new ruby is already on your path. If not, add the path to your ~/.bash_login. My path was /usr/local/bin. This is explained in Search Path.
  However I am not sure if this step is needed, because I later discovered that I used the wrong path and it still worked.
• Next I created the environment.plist as explained in Search Path. This was crucial in my case to get it working.

Observations

• I want my post to have the draft status, so I can look in WordPress if I like how it looks before posting. It took me some time before I found out that there is a status header. I just tried it and it got highlighted. It is just not there in the Headers command. If Brad Choate who maintains the Blogging Bundle adds that it would be even nicer. For now just type Status: draft and it will be marked as a draft by WordPress.
• I’m doing HTML. Why does WordPress.com not support Textile or Markdown? Especially since there is a markdown plugin That would be so much better.
• The TextMate preview functionality Rocks! And so does the image drag and drop.

There is a WordPress plugin Preserve code formatting However when your blog is hosted by WordPress.com that plugin is of no use.

I’ve heard of people posting code through an image. That seemed a bit bothersome to me. So I played around a bit and the following trick works for me:

Type or copy the code in TextMate and use Create HTML From Selection (With Line Numbers). This will create a completely unreadable (in my eyes) piece of HTML. Paste that (use the code view of WordPress) and voila. Spaces, tabs, <, > are all preserved. As can be seen in the following snippet

    1 <ServiceUsage>
    2     <OperationUsage>
    3         <ServiceName>AmazonS3</ServiceName>
    4         <OperationName>StandardStorage</OperationName>
    5         <UsageType>TimedStorage-ByteHrs</UsageType>
    6         <Resource>476de2a71aa5a476f84d48e4d61c980-default</Resource>
    7         <StartTime>07/01/07 00:00:00</StartTime>
    8         <EndTime>07/02/07 00:00:00</EndTime>
    9         <UsageValue>220303585632</UsageValue>
   10     </OperationUsage>
   11 </ServiceUsage> 

Only the <pre class=”textmate-source”> line will be converted to <pre>. I do not know why. The first “interceptor” you will be able to use for your CSS needs is :<span class=”text text_xml”>

I added the following line to CSS:

.text {
font:1.1em 'Courier New', Courier, Fixed;
}

Oh and do not use the integrated WordPress editor. That can really hurt if you overwrite your text per accident and the automatic save kicks in

I lost my S3 blog because of that. So first I’m going to experiment with TextMate blogging facilities…