Blogging with Emacs

May 11, 2007 · Filed under Emacs, Web

This is my first blog entry with my brand new toy, the weblogging mode for Emacs. It uses the XML-RPC interface of your favorite blogging platform to manage your blog. In other words, it transformes Emacs into a thermonuclear blog editor.

Even better, the installation is simple and easy. Here’s the instructions how to get it working. First, check out the source code of weblogger into your .emacs.d directory:

cd ~/.emacs.d/
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:/sources/emacsweblogs \
  co -d weblogger weblogger/lisp

Then, make Emacs load this mode on startup by adding these two lines to your .emacs configuration:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/weblogger")
(require 'weblogger)

Now, you probably want to reload your configuration with M-x eval-buffer (assuming your .emacs is still open). Finally, setup weblogger for your blog with M-x weblogger-setup-weblog. This command will ask you a few simple questions, like your username and password for your blog. It will also ask you for the location of the XML-RPC interface of your blog. If you’re using WordPress, it will be somewhere like http://example.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. If you’re using another blog publishing platform like Blogger or MovableType, it will be somewhere else, so check your documentation.

And you’re done! You can now start new a new post with M-x weblogger-start-entry. Weblogger also includes a whole set of other commands for managing your blog. Look them up, with C-h a weblogger RET. Happy blogging!

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7 Comments

  1. Gabriel said,

    June 2, 2007 @ 7:13 pm

    I’ve used weblogger.el and works nice with wordpress. The only thing that keeps me from using it constantly is the fact that my posts from it dont have a title. Then I have to manually go to my wordpress admin page, edit the post and republish, so its useless to use it like this. Does this happen to you as well? Or do I have to set up something else that I’m missing?

  2. Alexandre said,

    June 3, 2007 @ 1:17 pm

    Unfortunately, I stopped using weblogger.el after it stopped working for my blog, and because I am too lazy to fix it. However, I do remember that I was able to edit the title of my posts. Perhaps, it would be a good idea to contact the author of the mode, Mark A. Hershberger <mah (at) everybody (dot) org>, about the problem.

  3. Tim Daniel said,

    June 25, 2007 @ 1:52 pm

    Thats a easy one. I also had this Problem and I solved it that I entered the <title>foo</title> tag in the body and suprise the entry had a title.

  4. Tim Daniel said,

    June 25, 2007 @ 1:53 pm

    hmm, I wanted to enter >title<foo>/title< but it somehow messed up…

  5. Alexandre said,

    June 25, 2007 @ 2:13 pm

    I gave another go to webblogger.el, and it worked again! WordPress 2.2.1 probably fixed the bug I had with the XML-RPC interface.

    Tim, it seems the HTML filter of WordPress gobbled your </title> tag. I guess I will have to enable Markdown again for the comments.

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