There is a problem with all these web-based communication tools (websites, webmail, twitter, facebook...) for people who learned to use computers back in the good old days. The easiest way to type information into a computer is to use emacs, and many of the people who design these things don't seem to understand that.
Of course, the people who use emacs are very clever at getting around this problem, and there are by now good solutions for the older tools:
- Gnus will read and write email with any mail technology that uses standard POP or IMAP interfaces.
- Tramp will let you edit a file on any computer that you can get to via any normal protocol.
- Psgml is pretty good for editing html pages.
- SQL mode will let you manipulate a database on any machine you can get to.
Blogging isn't as old a technology as the things above, and while there's been some work on packages that will let you open a buffer and then post its contents directly from emacs, I haven't made them work successfully. I'm not alone -- this post by a frequent contributor to the emacs newsgroups suggests that he ended up with the same solution as I did, after much the same problems with the packages.
Of course, there are lots of other ways to work posting besides doing it directly from emacs. For a while, I was invoking an emacs client from firefox via a program called mosex, which is hard to find on google because the Museum of Sex in New York uses mosex as a nickname. But I think mosex stopped working on some firefox upgrade, and having emacs clients hanging around was a bit of a nuisance.
So what I do now is just open an html file on my own computer, edit it using psgml, and then mouse the results into the normal Wordpress admin page, trying to remember to set the category and the keywords every time.
![[Buy from the laymusic lulu.com store]](http://www.lulu.com/services/buy_now_buttons/images/gray.gif)
![[SerpentPublications.org]](http://www.serpentpublications.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/serpentpublications/images/spbanner-colorbox.png)
One Comment
I’ve recently switched my own blogging routine to jekyll, http://www.github.com/mojombo/jekyll/ and I’ve been quite pleased with the result. I can use emacs, I don’t need to dick around with a web based interface, I just write, save, commit to a version control system and type a command that sends it to the server and rebuilds the website. Tada. You could do it with tramp, I suppose.
When that’s not an option there are a couple of other firefox extensions, first the “it’s all text” extension makes it easier to open a text field in your favorite text editor (emacs, presumably). Secondly, the vimperator plugin makes it easier to open an external editor. I use it with emacsclient, of course.
The truth is, that I think the ideal solution to the “weblog posting problem” is to use the XML-RPC apis (eg. metaweblog) to build a FUSE file system that represents the blog, on your disk, as a bunch of files that you can go in and edit, save and tada. There’s a bit of code that does this already, but I think it probably needs more work. Time will tell
One Trackback
[...] I started thinking about this again after my post about how I write my posts. [...]