Tehom

Emacs+org-mode and blogger

A few days ago when I set up this blog, the first thing I thought about was how I could write posts with emacs and org-mode. Yes, Blogger provides an online editor, but I loathe online editors. Why would I want to type into a little box and pick from a markup menu when I can use emacs?

For the moment, I am using a package called weblogger.el It works well but it doesn't let me upload images.

A few observations:

• Org-mode will export HTML but it wasn't immediately obvious how to make it export the body. Those who are familiar with org-mode won't be surprised to hear that there is already a way to do that. It's just not offered as an option in `org-export' (C-c C-e). It's just:

  (org-export-as-html nil nil nil "*Org HTML Export*" t)
  

• Pasting text into Blogger is a non-starter.
  • I don't want to do that manually every time I post
  • The online editor "helps" you, thus ruining the post.
• I tried Blogger's mail-to-post interface. It sort of works, but:
  • Can't upload images. Google's docs say you can¹. But I found that an attached file was simply displayed literally, as line-noise-looking text.
  • In order to post HTML, you have to convince your mail client to send content-type text/html instead of text/plain. My ISP's squirrelmail webmail simply would not do that.

    There is a bright side to that: It pushed me to reconfigure my SMTP setup. Years back I abandoned it because it wouldn't work over dialup. Back then it was all sendmail, now it's all exim-4 and easy to configure. Kids these days!

    Nevertheless, I am not using the mail-to-post interface because weblogger is better.

  • It doesn't support labels.
• Weblogger.el is easy to set up, just customize it.
  • It tries to send labels, but Blogger drops them.
• One problem using Blogger with Weblogger is that what Blogger wants for your username is not your Google username but your email address. Weblogger doesn't know this - it serves not just Blogger but anything that takes xml-rpc - so it just calls that field "username". Confusing unless you know it.
• Even better, I'd have liked to use an Atom API instead of an XML-RPC API. That may still happen, but I'm not in that much of a hurry. My main reason for changing would be to can upload images². But none of the packages seemed to support that. I looked at these:

  emacs-atom-api

  gone.

  atompub.el

  The code seemed messy, and when it set up an XML buffer and wanted nxml, I bailed.

  Google's g-client

  Haven't tried it out. I'm looking at it now. Doesn't appear to handle images, but I know Atom can do so.

Footnotes:

¹ Google's docs say "To include an image in your post, you can attach an image to you your email."

² Mostly dia diagrams converted to images, I expect.