[Orgmode] Musings about Blogging

[Emre Sahin]

Hi all, 

Recently I grew sick of Wordpress and started to look for an
alternative in the Emacs world. If you know Turkish, you may read my
post on http://emresahin.net/2007/06/10/wordpresse-veda/ . Otherwise,
I can summarize that I was writing a package to post to Wordpress
blogs in Emacs, which (unlike weblogger.el) had category completion
and creation on demand and allowed to post in any mode, especially in
HTML Helper mode.  Category creation required a new XML-RPC function
in WP 2.2 and when I had to move it, it converted my Turkish letters
into another language. I was already having bad feelings about the
speed of the program and I decided that a static (or sans database)
blog might be a better alternative. The only real benefit of having a
db connection is searching, and using namazu or Google etc. for this
is much more rational. At least, in my blog I don't receive much
requests for in-site search. Hence I decided to try org-blog, blorg
and muse.

Anyways, currently I think to make a package to download WP (and maybe
Blogger) blog posts via XML-RPC and make respective org-blog, blorg
and Muse pages for these. As far as I checked, not all features of
current blogging software (like categories) is supported by these,
however at least a package to ease ("my") migration is possible. I'm not
fluent in elisp, but this may be a nice opportunity. :)

Also, these three modes can have an option to publish into PHP instead
of HTML. PHP part can be responsible from showing comments and a
comment form in single pages, saving comments into text files,
checking spam via external services, emailing comments to the author
etc. (I played with Muse's publishing styles and tried to write a new
"journal-php" one which embeds PHP functionality into the footer. I
think this is doable in its current capabilities but default HTML
output of Muse seems somewhat dated to me; without <div> tags which
ease CSS integration.) However, for this other options about comments
etc. further keywords and properties in alists may be necessary. For
example ALLOW-COMMENT / DENY-COMMENT directives may be put for pages
to control the comments. 

I'm aware of blosxom solution of Muse, but I didn't like to depend on
a third party package for this. Independent PHP pages that are
responsible for showing their comments seems much more appropriate
here. 

There may also be a Javascript based comment facility. It can
be possible to have comments just using Javascript. But JS is much
more unreliable than a server side solution. 

I don't know if org-blog will (do?) have templates or categories, but
blorg.el's capabilities seemed better in this aspect. Changing
templates and embedding some php for blogging tasks seems
possible. 

Any comments & directions much appreciated. Thanks and best regards, 

Emre