org-blog - simple blog writing and publishing using org-mode

The purpose of org-blog is to allow you to use org-mode markup to create content for one or more blogs, keep local copies of articles, synchronize local and remote copies as much as is sensible, and do it all from within emacs with a minimum of fuss.

It’s not there yet, by any means.

The 5-second introduction

• Use M-x org-blog-new to start a new article.
• Fill in the header information
• Create your content
• Use C-c C-b p to post the article
• Use C-x C-s to save the article

The somewhat longer introduction

What I didn’t mention in the 5-second introduction is that this will prompt you for a lot of stuff each time you go through the process, and you won’t have access to the full capabilities of the system—but it will work (assuming, for the moment, that you’re using WordPress, though I hope that will change before long).

A little configuration can go a long way toward making the ease the 5-second introduction promises a reality.

Configure

Eventually we will have a M-x customize interface, but for the moment you must do it by hand.

Configuration consists almost entirely of telling org-blog about the blogs you want to write for.

The simplest configuration simply tells org-blog the names of your blogs:

(setq org-blog-alist '(("foo.example.com")
                       ("bar.example.com")))

A name can be any string—but you should choose carefully, because if you change it in the org-blog-alist, you will need to change it in local copies of older articles if you want to be able to update them with org-blog.

A more complete configuration starts to tell org-blog about how to access the blog. The single most important piece of information is what sort of blogging software, This is the :engine. Right now the only package we support is WordPress (denoted as “wp”), but it’s not an excessive amount of effort to add support for other platforms.

(setq org-blog-alist '(("foo.example.com" . ((:engine . "wp"))))

What other parameters are appropriate depend on the :engine.

WordPress

An example WordPress blog configuration looks like:

(setq org-blog-alist '(("foo.example.com" . ((:blog-id . 1)
                                             (:engine . "wp")
                                             (:password . "Pantheon Idiot Vigor")
                                             (:username .  "notarealuser")
                                             (:xmlrpc . "http://blog1.example.com/xmlrpc.php")))))

The fields are as follows:

:blog-id

This is the ID of the blog. If you don’t know it, and you’ve only got one blog on the server, don’t worry about it, we can figure it out automatically. If you have more than one, things get more interesting. We don’t yet help you figure out what the right entry is.

:password

This is the password used for posting articles to the server.

:username

This is the username used for posting articles to the server.

:xmlrpc

This is the URL used for posting articles to the server. It will almost always end in xmlrpc.php for WordPress blogs.

Other

We’ll add information on other blogging engines as we add them.

Write

As above, begin a new article with M-x org-blog-new—if you have more than one blog, it will prompt you to choose the one for which the post is intended. This isn’t really obligating you to anything—you can change what’s in the file once you’ve started editing.

A new buffer will be created, and filled in with a template of the values you might want to specify for this article. Write away, using the full power of org-mode markup (with some caveats we will figure out as we go along).

Post it

When you go to post the article using C-c C-b p, you will be prompted to provide any of the information you did not include in the org-blog-alist.

A copy of the article will be sent to the blogging engine, and then any additional information necessary for keeping things in sync will be retrieved and recorded in the buffer.

You should then save the article to a file.

Done

On a day-to-day basis, there’s not much more to it than that.