Using Emacs and Markdown for Wordpress posting

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Open-Source on /usr

Using Emacs and Markdown for Wordpress posting