I love blogging with org2blog. I write my posts as normal Org documents and org2blog takes care of everything else including renaming and uploading jpegs and things like that.
About a year ago, I started having problems with org2blog dying and hanging Emacs. It turned out that Emacs 25.1 had a small change that meant multibyte characters could no longer be sent by the url-http library, which org2blog uses to upload posts. I don’t have many non-ascii unicode characters in my posts but occasionally I need one for things like accented names and special characters. The most usual case is the em-dash. I can type --- and the blog will get an em-dash but for some reason I don’t understand, the RSS feed will turn that into gibberish. I solved that problem by using the TeX input mode, which inserted a unicode em-dash that worked in both places.
After Emacs 25.1, none of that worked and I had to go to great lengths to get names accented correctly. And, of course, the em-dashes in the RSS feed were broken again. I worked sporadically at fixing things but even though I knew what the problem was I couldn’t get it working. Now Grant Rettke has opened a Pull Request to the xml-rpc library that solves the problem.
If you’re an org2blog user and are having the same problem, you can wait until the patch gets merged or you can simply apply it yourself to xml-rpc.el. It’s only 3 lines so it’s simple to do it by hand. In any event, many thanks to Grant for resolving this problem.
*UPDATE : Grant has posted a copy of the complete file if you want to grab a copy.