I type a lot of link code, and HTML in general. Is anyone aware of any Windows software (or even a Firefox extension) that allows programmable hot keys, so that I could do <blockquote> or <a href="" target=""> with a single (or dual) keystroke? It would help a lot with my incipient carpal tunnel problems.

You could learn Emacs. Not only can you easily program your abbreviation, and much more besides (e.g. regular-expression search and replace), you can load the xml-lite library that automatically closes whatever tag is open when you type "</". For example it will insert "</blockquote>" if the most recently opened tag was "<blockquote>". Oh, it also colors the file so that the tags and text appear in different colors, and automatically indent things so that the structure of the file is apparent.

But Emacs has a steep learning curve and can be a pain to install on Windoze.

search on "windows keyboard macros" returns some good candidates.

This looks useful, but I never tried it..

http://www.autohotkey.com/

emacs is certainly good. It is totally trivial to make a keybinding that lets you, say, put the cursor to the right of (or in) a URL in you text and then automatically puts '' after it, and leaves the cursor before the ''. In fact you can do that one just by recording keystrokes, not even programming in elisp.

I know of plenty of good GUI editors on the Mac that do this sort of thing well too, ranging from BBEdit to TextMate. No clue on Windows, sorry.

I use AutoHotKey. It'll certainly do what you want. (I use it to insert today's date in filenames.) I haven't had any problems with it.

If you can stand a separate editor, or are using Opera or another program that allows designating the program to be used for "View Source", allow me to recommend PSPad (www.pspad.com). It's freeware, has more or less freely programmable keys including function keys and chords, color-codes the syntax, includes Tidy, and has links to most of the HTML and CSS verification sites available via mouse-click or hotkey. The functions you're asking for would be trivial or nearly so in PSPad.

The "View Source" function in FireFox appears to be a crippled version of PSPad. (I hate that. I would go back to Opera if it weren't almost as bloated and ad-enabling as IE these days.)

I actually prefer another one called PFE (Programmer's File Editor) but the developer quit updating it several years ago, and it doesn't have any HTML-centric features.

Regards,
Ric

I do a lot of copying and pasting with my job. I use a program called Clipboard recorder. It acts like a cache file for your clipboard. You can activate the record button to have it record a series of paste-able items into a cache file. Then turn off the recording to delimit the subset of frequently used items. Then using [ctrl]+[alt] V you can quickly cycle through and paste items where need. The key binding are customizable to your preference. You can even share your clipboard cache files between multiple computers. Assuming your using Windoze that is.

Our just scroll through the filtered list of blogging addons here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?cat=1&app=firefox&appfilter=firefox&type=E

I think there are several different types of extensions that say they will grab pages and post them to your blog.

Haha I suck at code :P

Have you considered a hardware solution? You can even get foot pedals, so a quick press of the foot gives you the <blockquote> you want.

another hardware solution:
http://www.monu-cad.com/keyboard.htm
24 programable keys with up to 320 characters each

HTML-kit has similar functionality to PSPad, based on the description of PSpad above. It also allows you to load different modules for context-highlighting in just about any language, has reg-expression search and replace, "find all" capabilities, auto-complete and auto-close for tags, etc.

I found it to be quite valuable when I was learning Perl, for troubleshooting massively long SQL statements, etc.