Brendan Johan Lee's blog

I quickly came to realize that gsmblog.net would not be used as a day-to-day blog. The reason? It's just too much work to be publishing using traditional blog-software. Web-editors suck! Thus gsmblog.net would never evolve beyond longer tutorials and howtos.

I realized that if I wanted to have a day-to-day blog, I would have to create something simpler. Preferably something inside Emacs and/or Conkeror. After putting it off for a long time, I've finally got around to creating a proper blog solution. The result is this blog.

It's very simple. Anywhere inside Emacs I hit C-c 5 r c where C-c 5 r runs org-remember and c selects my blog template. I then write my blog entry, hit C-c C-c saving the entry to my blog.org file, and finally hit C-c 5 p to publish the blog to my server.

Inside Conkeror the procedure is basically the same. The only difference is that C-c 5 r pops up Emacs before calling org-remember, and that the URL of the website in focus in Conkeror is included automatically in the blog post, thus enabling me to blog about websites I come across in a very simple manner.

So now bloging is just as simple and quick as saving a todo in org-mode.

Here is how the magic happens: I've created a special template in org-mode that is customized for blog posts that get sent to my blog.org file. In addition I've integrated org-remember into Conkeror. I've than done some magic in my .emacs-file that exports the content of my blog.org file to post-files to be used with jekyll. Finally the directory containing the post-files (and the blog.org for that matter - but that really isn't part of the magic) is commited to my gitosis-server.

On the server I've created a post-receive-hook for the repository containing the post-files that automatically checks out the repository when checked in and then runs jekyll to create the final html-files for the blog.

So now I can blog from any machine anywhere, as long as I've checked out my emacs, blog, org-mode and configuration repositories.