org-blog 0.9 release

org-blog 0.9 release

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Dear org-mode users,

I've just tagged version 0.90 of my org-blog minor mode on github[1].

This is intended to be a simple but powerful assistant to using Org for
writing blog posts---there's only two commands at this point, and I
don't anticipate that number going beyond three anytime soon (though I
do have that third one planned! ;)

At the moment it only supports WordPress blogs, but the design is very
modular, and adding support for other back-ends (including, I hope,
static publishing back-ends) should be relatively painless.  If it's
not, I would be happy to change things to make it so, once I understand
the issues.

I have one outstanding bug[2], that timestamps get mangled.  I thought
I'd squashed it, but apparently not.  I need to create a test and track
that down.

The only other immediate issue I see is that it is still using the 7.8.x
exporter---converting to (or supporting in parallel if possible) the 8.0
exporter is next on my list of things to do.

I wrote a series of posts going through the implementation on my
blog[3]---all authored with org-blog itself.

Although this is the first thing I've written for Emacs outside of
hacking on my .emacs.d, I think the code is fairly clear.  I would
appreciate feedback, and would enjoy and even solicit assitance with
some things: for instance, as a Debian user, I turn out to not know
MELPA/Marmalade from a hole in the ground---so if someone was motivated
to create the changes to support package installation though emacs, I
would be quite happy to merge it. ;)

There's a TODO list of things I hope to work on, and I would be happy to
add to that as well; knowing that people are using it is going to be the
greatest motivation for things to happen---otherwise I will probably
plod along doing things in my own sweet time, since it's working pretty
well for me so far.

Cheers,

Mike.

[1] https://github.com/mdorman/org-blog
[2] https://github.com/mdorman/org-blog/issues/16
[2] http://doyouevenlisp.com/tag/org-blog/

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Rafael]

Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman@ironicdesign.com> writes:

> I've just tagged version 0.90 of my org-blog minor mode on github[1].
>
> This is intended to be a simple but powerful assistant to using Org for
> writing blog posts---there's only two commands at this point, and I
> don't anticipate that number going beyond three anytime soon (though I
> do have that third one planned! ;)
>
> At the moment it only supports WordPress blogs, but the design is very
> modular, and adding support for other back-ends (including, I hope,
> static publishing back-ends) should be relatively painless.  If it's
> not, I would be happy to change things to make it so, once I understand
> the issues.

Thanks a lot for your work! I just tried it and it worked for me, to
post a basic org-mode file. Are you aware of
https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog? It also has the purpose to post
to wordpress from org, however its author has been busy lately, and
apparently major work is going to be needed to make all its features to
work with the new exporter. I hope that you could find the time and
motivation to make your package deal with:

- inclusion of image files
- matematical symbols (that is, wordpress can display LaTeX stuff like
  $latex a^2+b^2=c^2$ nicely.
- syntax code highlighting, native to wordpress. 

See for example http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/29178/,
where some of these feature requests were done for org2blog, and for
example my post:
http://graphtheoryinlatex.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/a-cayley-graph/ to
see these features in action.

Rafael

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Puneeth Chaganti]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Rafael <rvf0068@gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman@ironicdesign.com> writes:
>
>> I've just tagged version 0.90 of my org-blog minor mode on github[1].
>>
>> This is intended to be a simple but powerful assistant to using Org for
>> writing blog posts---there's only two commands at this point, and I
>> don't anticipate that number going beyond three anytime soon (though I
>> do have that third one planned! ;)
>>
>> At the moment it only supports WordPress blogs, but the design is very
>> modular, and adding support for other back-ends (including, I hope,
>> static publishing back-ends) should be relatively painless.  If it's
>> not, I would be happy to change things to make it so, once I understand
>> the issues.
>
> Thanks a lot for your work! I just tried it and it worked for me, to
> post a basic org-mode file. Are you aware of
> https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog? It also has the purpose to post
> to wordpress from org, however its author has been busy lately, and
> apparently major work is going to be needed to make all its features to
> work with the new exporter.

Or, if it seems reasonable, we could club the two projects into a
single one to give the users something that's better than a sum of the
parts!

Cheers!
Puneeth (aka punchagan)

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Puneeth Chaganti <punchagan@gmail.com> writes:
> Or, if it seems reasonable, we could club the two projects into a
> single one to give the users something that's better than a sum of the
> parts!

Hi, Puneeth,

While I'm not sure the structure of the two tools is really amenable to
being joined---the code is very, very different, and I am, of course,
biased toward mine ;)---it seems to me *that* a common ox-blog (or
whatever) back-end could be a good point of collaboration: it would help
jump-start getting org2blog to where it work with 8.0, and it would get
org-blog the more sophisticated export capabilities that Rafael seeks.

What I'm imagining is an exporter derived from org-html (of which I've
already got the basics done) that adds on the additional features you've
implemented in org2blog.

If you don't mind, I will start looking at the org2blog code and seeing
how cleanly I can implement these additional capabilities as handlers or
filters for the exporter---and then maybe we could look for that
back-end to live in contrib, and both our codebases could take advantage
of it?

Cheers,

Mike.

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Puneeth Chaganti]

Mike,

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Michael Alan Dorman
<mdorman@ironicdesign.com> wrote:
> Puneeth Chaganti <punchagan@gmail.com> writes:
>> Or, if it seems reasonable, we could club the two projects into a
>> single one to give the users something that's better than a sum of the
>> parts!
[..]
> If you don't mind, I will start looking at the org2blog code and seeing
> how cleanly I can implement these additional capabilities as handlers or
> filters for the exporter---and then maybe we could look for that
> back-end to live in contrib, and both our codebases could take advantage
> of it?

That seems like a good plan.  I've been meaning to get this going for
some time, but have been quite busy off-late.  I'll try to make some
time for it, soon.

Thanks!
Puneeth

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Matt Price]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Puneeth Chaganti <punchagan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mike,
>
> On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Michael Alan Dorman
> <mdorman@ironicdesign.com> wrote:
>> Puneeth Chaganti <punchagan@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Or, if it seems reasonable, we could club the two projects into a
>>> single one to give the users something that's better than a sum of the
>>> parts!
> [..]
>> If you don't mind, I will start looking at the org2blog code and seeing
>> how cleanly I can implement these additional capabilities as handlers or
>> filters for the exporter---and then maybe we could look for that
>> back-end to live in contrib, and both our codebases could take advantage
>> of it?
>
> That seems like a good plan.  I've been meaning to get this going for
> some time, but have been quite busy off-late.  I'll try to make some
> time for it, soon.
>

Hi guys!

Was there ever any progress on this?  I code so slowly I'd not likely
be much help with the actual implementation but would be happy to pull
from git and do some testing if that's of any use.


Thanks!
Matt



> Thanks!
> Puneeth
>

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:
> On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Puneeth Chaganti <punchagan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Michael Alan Dorman
>>> If you don't mind, I will start looking at the org2blog code and seeing
>>> how cleanly I can implement these additional capabilities as handlers or
>>> filters for the exporter---and then maybe we could look for that
>>> back-end to live in contrib, and both our codebases could take advantage
>>> of it?
>>
>> That seems like a good plan.  I've been meaning to get this going for
>> some time, but have been quite busy off-late.  I'll try to make some
>> time for it, soon.
>
> Was there ever any progress on this?  I code so slowly I'd not likely
> be much help with the actual implementation but would be happy to pull
> from git and do some testing if that's of any use.

Well, it's not an ex-parrot---which is to say, I still have the
intention to work on it---but 1) my $DAYJOB has gotten busy, and 2) with
many of the additional features being Wordpress-specific, it demands
that I do some significant refactoring of my code for me to do it in a
way that doesn't tie the whole thing to Wordpress.

That said: Puneeth, it seems like most of your additional features are
currently implemented as post-processing bits---could you just grab the
new-exporter-based code that I have now and use that?  It's not an
all-singing, all-dancing solution, but it might get your users able to
use 8.0 sooner.

Mike.

Re: org-blog 0.9 release

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Rafael <rvf0068@gmail.com> writes:
> Thanks a lot for your work! I just tried it and it worked for me, to
> post a basic org-mode file.

Thanks for trying it---it's always nice to hear that it works for
someone else, too.

I'm hopeful that, by having a fairly fleshed-out test suite included, if
it doesn't work for someone, the user and I should be able to track down
the issue fairly easily.

> Are you aware of https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog? It also has
> the purpose to post to wordpress from org, however its author has been
> busy lately, and apparently major work is going to be needed to make
> all its features to work with the new exporter. I hope that you could
> find the time and motivation to make your package deal with:

Yep, I'm aware of org2blog---I even used it for a while.  There were
various things about it for which I did not care, and they seemed fairly
fundamental and unlikely to change.

I suspect writing a blogging addition for org-mode is today's equivalent
of writing your own templating engine for Perl: the bar for entry is low
enough that the slightest disagreement with an existing one is cause for
writing your own. ;)

> - inclusion of image files
> - matematical symbols (that is, wordpress can display LaTeX stuff like
>   $latex a^2+b^2=c^2$ nicely.
> - syntax code highlighting, native to wordpress. 

I do want to add more sophisticated content handling capabilities.

Image (or other) attachments is an item I want myself.  While I support
the idea of other, more sophisticated formatting, since I don't have a
direct stake in most of them, I'm not sure what the best way to present
them is.  If org2blog's presentation seems sensible, I will probably
follow that just to be compatible.

Incidentally, I've tagged 0.10 which has converted to the org-8.0
exporter.

In fact, it's probably good that you brought this up now: I do need to
implement some additional processing of the exported content (even when
you present it with full HTML input, where whitespace shouldn't matter,
stupid WordPress inserts line breaks whereever there are newlines).

I figure if I design it correctly, the additional processing should be
extensible to support the sort of rich content you're talking about as
well.

Mike.