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Blogging With Emacs

twitch.nervestaple.com

75 pointsmofeeta20 comments

I wrote org-jekyll to blog from org-mode, and have been using emacs to produce all my sites ever since:

The problem I was trying to solve with org-jekyll was separating more or less static content, generated with standard org-publish, from blog posts, generated by org-jekyll and going to the _posts directory (and thus being part of the feed generation, etc). I haven't kept up with org-mode development lately, there might be easier ways to do it now.

For more information on bloggin from Org-mode, see http://orgmode.org/worg/org-blog-wiki.html

Also, the many options available in Org-mode projects make jekyll nearly superfluous (e.g., things like site wide css/js and page templates are baked in), see http://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html

Org-mode always seems cool but I have never really gotten around to trying it out. What I find myself needing lately is a universal input system that lets me send it data from emacs, web, email, and mobile, as well as easy review and categorization and all that jazz. Ideally I'd be able to take that and directly reference it in an emacs buffer while I write a blog post or something.

Any ideas?

In OSX it's not too hard to set up with orgmode. This will allow you to easily link to mail:

(require 'org-mac-message)

(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "C-c C-x m") 'org-mac-message-insert-selected)

I find that the easiest way to categorize email, especially when I need to generate a todo item from it (to be later ignored among way too many todo items), is to link to it from an org-mode buffer.

There are tools for referencing directly to whatever is in your browser, check out org-mac-protocol (https://github.com/claviclaws/org-mac-protocol).

There's also an iphone app that allows input from your iphone and easy syncing with emacs and orgmode, http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/.

That iPhone app looks cool. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to email a special address and it automatically getting appended to an org buffer, or something like that.

Org-mode links can point to all sorts of content including email, web pages, specific lines in files on your system, etc... see http://orgmode.org/manual/Hyperlinks.html

I just stick with Emacs for composing posts. Format them with Markdown and copy from my Emacs buffer into Wordpress. Simple enough for me. All the files are on Github, so I guess I could create a plug-in to pull from Github into Wordpress, but after spending an hour writing an article, spending two seconds hitting cutting and pasting isn't a significant waste of time.

"up to you to generate the quality content that only you can generate"

Surely there's a more elegant way to state that. One that doesn't use the words "generate" and "content".

Ick, it looks that much worse when someone is quoting me! Consider me duly shamed for that absolutely awful sentence.

Having Vi burned into my muscle memory since the 80's I could never use (literally) emacs for more than 30seconds without inevitably random "i"'s, some "/regx", etc embedded in my text - (that and the RMI inducing ctl-meta-esc-alt-x'ing thing ;))

I love Jekyll/Octopress - but my tool chain of choice for post writing is...

IA -> Marked -> jekyll/s3cmd with a tripwire script -> s3 -> cloudfront

Write - save - blam.

You can also use github repositories to actually serve up your blog if you use jekyll! I run my blog using this setup + github and it works pretty well.

You can even point domains at these, so that GitHub hosts your content but it's all under your domain name.

If you just want to use org-mode with Octopress this is how: http://jaderholm.com/blog/blog/2011/09/26/blogging-with-org-...

There is also this org2blog(https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog) which lets you publish directly from Emacs’ org-mode to WordPress blogs.

It seems to me this article would be better titled as 'Blogging with Jekyll' as Jekyll seems to be the time it spends most of its time on.

That is a good point. When I started this post, my goal was to put something together that would let me write the articles from Emacs and easily get them out on the internets. It turned out that the Jekyll part took much more time than the Org Mode part.

As a side note, the author has a very beautiful color scheme on the screenshot. I suspect the Solarized scheme.

That is correct! I'm using sellout's Solarized color theme for Emacs[0]. It's also available in the Marmalade[1] repository under "color-theme-solarized".

[0] https://github.com/sellout/emacs-color-theme-solarized

[1] http://marmalade-repo.org/

For me it conflicts with the Gnome Terminal Solarized theme though. I had to switch to GTK Emacs (from emacs -nw) to get the color scheme to work. But it looks fantastic now :)

org-mode is the gateway drug for emacs and in my opinion, one of the things that makes emacs great. A user, Carsten Dominik had a need for someone, hacked some elisp and it grew into something awesome. It's still one of my favorite pieces of software.

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