Emacs

Found an interesting Emacs blog with lots of tips and tricks, and is run by Ryan McGeary. The entry for running Emacs on OS X is useful. Ryan recommends the Carbon Emacs package, which is a pre-packaged version of the GNU Emacs version 22, and contains a ton of extra packages not available in the CVS Version. I personally use the latest Gnu Emacs Version 22 from the CVS repository, and compile the application manually (well, via a cron job actually) every month or so, to keep up with the latest developer changes being made in the code-repository itself (which - BTW - can be tracked via the Emacs devel newsgroup), and prefer to manually setup the packages I need. Apart from the literally thousands of site on the net dealing with Emacs, one wiki Site I can whole-heartily recommend is the Emacs Wiki: http://emacswiki.org/, a fantastic resource on Emacs of all varieties, and catering users from newbies through über-geeks.

While setting up this site (which is based on Wordpress), I was evaluating a few offline blog editors, and came upon MarsEdit and Ecto - both of which seem to be well-accepted commercial blog editors in the Mac world. Both allow easy setup of the blog configurations, have a hassle-free configuration, and allow a mail-inbox like access to previous posts. My needs for the offline blogging tool are: Support Wordpress (obviously) Support formatting in Markdown (the default Wordpress formatting is atrocious). Note that you will need to enable Markdown syntax on your blog by using any of the plugins available for Wordpress. Provide easy access to prior posts Have a decent text editor built-in Provide at least a subset of my current editing muscle-memory However, I happen to be a Emacs fanatic, and perform majority of my day-to-day computing tasks in that tool (another post on this later). So I googled around a bit for the current state of blogging using Emacs, and voila! EmacsWiki pointed to the weblogger mode, which supports Wordpress, and also handles Markdown formatting easily with the markdown mode. And to top it off, the code is open-source, which means that I can tinker and change the functionality when needed. ...