E-blog is a project mainly written in Emacs Lisp, based on the GPL-2.0 license.
e-blog.el - a GNU Emacs interface to Blogger Copyright (C) 2007 Mikey Coulson
e-blog allows you to post, edit, label and delete posts on one or more blogs on Blogger. You must have curl http://curl.haxx.se to use e-blog. One of the original goals was to eliminate the need for curl, but upon further inspection of Emacs native url retrieving functions, I think that curl is the right tool for the job. Using native Emacs functions would actually increase the number of external dependencies.
One might ask, "Why another blogging interface to Emacs?" The short answer is that I couldn't find an interface that worked (or, probably more accurately, that I could get to work).
The longer answer is that many of the projects that exist for posting to Blogger use the deprecated Atom API, and much of the code will not work for posting. Blogger now uses the GData API. I couldn't find any existing code that utilizes this newer API.
So, I set out to write one of my own...
The original goal for e-blog was to provide a command that I could punch in and be presented with a buffer for writing a new post to Blogger and send it as if I were writing an e-mail. That was it. I didn't have a particular intention of going further with it.
I decided that if I was going to go that far, I may as well include the other features (updating, deleting) as well. These features are now included.
A few days after registering e-blog with Google Code, an issue was registered for allowing manipulation of labels, which is also now an included feature. Something interesting to note about labels is that there is no provision in the API for them. It is not difficult to add labels using the API, it is simply undocumented. For the most part, they will work as expected. The only thing that CANNOT be done with labels using e-blog is removing ALL labels from a post that previously had labels. I have verified that e-blog is submitting XML properly in such a case, but one label (the last label added or first of multiple labels) will remain with the post regardless.
There shouldn't be any setup, really. It should be as simple as: (load-file "/path-to-e-blog/e-blog.el") (e-blog-new-post)
e-blog will then ask you for your Blogger username and password. It will save the authorization token that is returned from Blogger so that, from within a single Emacs session, it will only need your username and password once.
NOTE: In this release, you can also move between `+', blog titles, and posts by using the TAB key.
e-blog will present you with a buffer allowing you to choose which
blog you want to send a post to. If you only have one blog, it
will still present you with this buffer so that you have the option
of listing and deleting posts. Simply move point to the name of
the blog that you want to post to and press
Clicking on the `+' next to a blog title will present you with a list of posts for that blog. Clicking on a post title will present you with a buffer for editing that post. C-c C-c in this new buffer will send the updated post to blogger.
Clicking on the `[X]' behind the title of a post will DELETE the post preceding it. e-blog asks for confirmation before deleting the post.
While posting or editing, you may specify any number of labels (or none) by typing a comma separated list of labels on the appropriate line in the post/edit buffer. If you are editing a post that has labels, you may change or delete them as usual. If you remove them all, one will remain anyway, as noted above.
There are a few convenient helper functions for doing html markup. To
use them, simply set the mark before any text you want to mark up and
call the associated key for formatting the text between mark and
point. Provided markups are links, typewriter, emphasize, and strong.
Their keys, respectively, are C-ch, C-ct, C-ci, and C-cs. These
keybindings are customizable, that is, e-blog will respect your
settings over its own. Simply set the variables, which are
e-blog-link-region-key',e-blog-tt-region-key',
e-blog-emphasize-key', ande-blog-strong-key'.
If you intend to use e-blog often, you could bind `e-blog-new-post' to a key. Personally, I have (global-set-key "\C-cb" 'e-blog-new-post) in my ~/.emacs.
Mikey Coulson [email protected]
If you have an issue or think you have found a bug in e-blog, you are welcome to use the `Issues' page at e-blog's home on http://e-blog.googlecode.com.
Even better is to skip filing an issue and e-mail me a patch that fixes said issue/bug.
If you haven't found an issue or bug, but have been using e-blog, drop me a line telling me how you use it, on what blog, etc. I would like to hear from you, and you will probably gain a blog subscriber by doing so.