I discovered Mike Zamansky’s blog about a year ago when I wrote about his transition to Nikola as a blogging platform. Shortly afterwards, he began his Using Emacs Series. His latest video has, in effect, come full circle as he, once again, looks at blogging with Nikola.
I always enjoy seeing other people’s workflows and particularly their blogging workflows. The video details Zamansky’s efforts to bring the entire blogging workflow under Emacs. After his transition to Nikola, a lot of the workflow was conducted on the command line. His latest improvements involve using Prodigy to manage the non-Emacs part of his workflow. He’s now at the point where virtually everything can be done from within Emacs.
Watching the video makes me appreciate anew the wonderful org2blog/wp that I use for blogging. Everything is completely contained within Emacs; I simply write my post as an Org mode file and call org2blog to post it to my WordPress site. Of course, many folks prefer static pages and don’t want to bother with a heavyweight CMS like WordPress. For them, a solution like Zamansky’s makes a lot of sense. You can do everything from within Emacs and the process is pretty much automated. There are, of course, solutions other than Nikola and I’ve written about some of them but since I don’t use them those posts could only describe what others said about them. If you’d like to start (or switch to) a statically paged blog, Zamansky’s video is a good place to start. The video is 14 minutes long.