Blogging with Emacs on tilde.team

When blogging on tilde.team, I really like the small `bb` utility for posting,
as it handles both WWW and Gopher easily. However, I don't like writing my
posts over SSH - mainly because my GUI Emacs is nicer to use when it comes
to key bindings.

Therefore I decided to create a small script or similar for posting from my
desktop emacs. This post contains the steps that I use, in case someone
wants to do the same.

## Just write markdown

As an Emacs user, I am of course heavily using org-mode. So I thought on
writing my blog posts in org and export them as markdown. However, that
adds some additional challenges:

- The markdown export from org creates some weird, empty HTML links in the file (reason unknown).
- The first line in the file is the title of the post, without any formatting (e.g. `#`).
- The last line contains the tags. These are stored in org usually at the top.

So naturally I thought of using an elisp macro, a shell script or similar
to make the required adjustments after the markdown export from org,
but then I decided just to write markdown. That saves me all the headache
of maintaining another piece of (very small) software.

## Post over SSH

For posting the finished post over SSH, I thought of using either tramp,
eshell, a regular shell script or a combination of them.

In the end, I decided that a very simple elisp snippet:

<pre>
(defun blog-post()
 (interactive)
 (shell-command (format "scp %s tilde:" (buffer-file-name)) nil nil)
 (async-shell-command (format "ssh tilde bb post %s" (buffer-name)))
 )
</pre>

tags: tilde, emacs

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