Yesterday I installed Org2blog, which allows me to write my blog posts in Emacs org-mode and push them to my WordPress blog from within Emacs. So far I like it a lot! One less reason to leave Emacs :-), and hopefully also a reason to blog more often. Other good things about keeping your blog posts in Emacs are:

  • You can simply export them to e.g. PDF. In my current setup it’s a easy as adding the line 

    #+LATEX_CLASS: lckartcl

    somewhere at the top of the file (before the actual text of the post starts) to tell org-mode that it should use my personal LaTeX export style, followed by C-c C-e l o and a nicely formatted PDF of my blog post pops up.

  • You keep all your blog posts in plain text format, so if you would decide to change to a different blogging platform, uploading the old posts should be fairly easy.

Org2blog’s GitHub page mentions C-c p as prefix key for Org2blog’s functions, but in my case this prefix is already used by Projectile, and looking in Org2blog’s Customize Group I noticed that C-c M-p is an alternative prefix, so I’m using that to get the following functionality:

C-c M-p p publish buffer
C-c M-p P post buffer as page and publish
C-c M-p d post buffer as draft
C-c M-p D post buffer as page draft
C-c M-p t complete category

This is the Org2blog configuration in my .emacs file (note that I’m using John Wiegley’s use-package macro): 

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Configure Org2blog, which allows me to write blog posts in org-mode
;; and then push them to my WordPress blog.
(use-package org2blog
  :config
  (require 'org2blog-autoloads)
  (setq org2blog/wp-blog-alist
        '(("blog.karssen.org"
           :url "https://blog.karssen.org/xmlrpc.php"
           :username "xxxxxx"
           :default-title "New blog post"
           :default-categories "Linux"
           :tags-as-categories nil)))
  )

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