xml-rpc: Submitting a blog article from emacs

I found out that the wordpress blog program provides an xml-rpc
interface and that the emacs packages weblogger.el and xml-rpc.el
(available from Savannah) allow one to submit blog articles from
emacs. I normally compose blog articles in emacs — unless the entry is
very short — and then copy it to the wordpress editor. So I was eager
to try this out and see if I can skip the ‘copy’ step and post the
article directly from emacs.

However, this won’t let me add url links, lists, blockquotes, images,
code blocks unless I type html. For that, there is a perl program, by John Gruber, called Markdown that does text to html conversion. I will check that out later. For now, the
2 url links in this post were created using emacs’ html-mode.

I still need to find out how I can specify the Category, tags, excerpts
etc.

I am going to type C-x C-s to post the article. Let us see if it
works. I might have to do some post-processing, like adding paragraph breaks.

Post-processing: The article got posted when I typed C-x C-s. But the url links didn’t show up properly as I was using the default Text-mode: “<” was converted to “&lt”. This should be fixed by changing the mode. Other than that it works great. The only drawback is that it makes it easy to submit frivolous posts!

About Babu Srinivasan

My interests are in computer security, cryptography, functional programming and general aviation. I occasionally write articles on these and other topics in my blog.

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