Blogging from emacs

I wrote a few months ago about how I post these entries. It seems a lot harder than what I do for email. I type one letter to set up whether I'm writing a new mail, replying to the sender, or replying to all recipients, and whether I want the contents of the message I'm replying to in the reply. Then I write my reply, and press a couple of keys to send it. All without ever leaving emacs, which is the editor that's in my fingers so I don't have to think about what to do to move the cursor or delete or reformat.

For a weblog entry, I can edit the actual text in emacs, but then I have to paste it into my browser and add tags and categories

So a couple of days ago I was catching up on news reading, and there was a bug reported about weblogger in the emacs help newsgroup, which indicated that the poster, while hitting an irritating problem, had gotten farther towards getting it to work than I had, so I decided to try it again.

Again, I didn't get anywhere, but I was energetic enough to send an email someone, who pointed me at someone else, who answered my initial questions quite calmly and pointed me at the bug list and the mailing list that he'd set up some time ago.

So I'm basically doing some testing for the developer on a platform (wordpress) that he doesn't have easy access to, and I believe that we'll eventually get a program that I really want to have, namely a direct interface between emacs and my blogs.

In this case, both wordpress and emacs are open source software, and they both use a well-documented protocol, so there aren't any insuperable barriers to being able to write this program that I wish I had -- someone just needs to write, document, test, and debug the code. I'm helping with the documenting and testing; maybe I'll at some point get into the debugging, although I was involved in gnus for several years without ever really touching the code.