A nicer editing environment

Since starting this worklog, I’ve been experimenting using the screen that WordPress provides for writing blog posts.

It’s good to see every now and then how the other half lives.

And I’m impressed: the blog editing screen WordPress gives you is significantly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, which distinguishes it from some other systems I have experienced.

But, well, not so nice that anyone could plausibly expect me to use it instead of Emacs. So today I decided it was time to get a bit more realistic about how to draft posts, particularly those that are tricky and that I want to get right. That means, I need a way to edit in Xemacs, using psgml.el’s XML mode, and conveniently upload to WordPress.

The editing-in-Xemacs part is easy. All I have to do is stop not doing it. What was needed was a stylesheet to translate from the version of TEI Lite I habitually use for writing, into the odd mix of normal XHTML and blank lines for paragraph breaks that WordPress uses. (I should probably experiment with using normal p elements — will WordPress let me use them?)

Answer: yes. So I don’t have to render paragraphs using just blank lines. And I didn’t really need to do a new stylesheet; I could just have used my existing TEI-to-HTML translation. I’ll comfort myself with the thought that the new stylesheet is smaller and has less cruft.

It’s still a little awkward that I have to cut and paste from my Emacs buffer into the WordPress write-post screen; I notice that David Carlisle seems to be able to edit existing posts from within emacs, using T. V. Raman’s g-client package. This makes me jealous, but not jealous enough to drop everything to work on an emacs mode for posts to WordPress. (Everything I haven’t already dropped in order to play with my tei-to-wordpress stylesheet and to write this post, that is.)

When the cut-and-paste gets annoying enough, I’ll take the time to make the stylesheet generate the post in Web-forms submission format, and write a script to upload to the server. But for now, being back in emacs for editing is enough.

3 thoughts on “A nicer editing environment

  1. Pingback: Abundance Affordance

  2. I have been using wordpress for about 8 months now and thoroughly enjoy it. Give it time and you will too!

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