[Emacsweblogs] Re: weblogger & major mode

[Mark A. Hershberger]

David Abrahams <address@hidden> writes:

> 0. Looks pretty nice!

Thanks!

> 1. entering and exiting the edit mode without making changes marks the
>    buffer as modified and these changes seem to get put into the undo
>    history.  I don't think we want either of those behaviors.

Right, that is a bug.

> 2. I'd like some universal way to get back to weblogger-mode without
>    “M-x weblogger-toggle-edit-body RET”.  In fact, I'd also like to be
>    able to post new articles and update existing posts without
>    returning to weblogger.  I'm sure I can code these things up
>    myself, but if weblogger-mode is aiming to be make blogging
>    painless for Emacs users, it should make these kinds of services
>    easy and/or available OOTB.

I totally agree.  I'd like to get rid of the reliance on message-mode
entirely.  Except for editing meta information (titles, tags, dates)
there is no need for it right now.

If we had an list of methods that took a buffer from a particular mode
to some universal format and then another set that could take it from
the universal format and communicate it to a weblogging engine, that
would be almost ideal.

Then one could simply invoke, say weblogger-post-this-buffer or
weblogger-post-this-region and it (might) prompt you for a title and
tags, but the rest would be seamless.

So, for example, posting from an org-mode buffer to a weblog hosted on
Blogger.com, after invoking weblogger-post-this-buffer, weblogger jumps
into action and executes this (hypothetical) series of functions:

    weblogger-post-this-buffer
      -translate-this
        -grab-meta-information ; some modes (org-mode) have ways to
                               ; embed meta information already.
      -prompt-for-targets ; should be possible to post to multiple blogs
                          ; with one go
      -get-meta-information
         -determine-missing-meta-information
         -prompt-for-meta-information ; some blogging engines have
                                      ; different needs
      -post-to-weblog
         -post-with-atom-blogger ; to get it to blogger.com

This is just a rough idea off the top of my head, but I think this can,
as you point out, all be done without requiring a special weblogger-mode
(which was a hack from the beginning).

Mark.

-- 
http://hexmode.com/

The only alternative to Tradition is bad tradition.
                          — Jaraslov Pelikan