Writing for Hypotheses in Org-mode

A fact that should perhaps be emphasized when promulgating academic blogging is: it’s not for everyone. If you can regularly write a sparkling essay in half an hour, say, during your commute or your lunch break, and you enjoy doing it—then it’s definitely for you. If, on the other hand, the only thing that’s regular about your writing is writer’s block, then you should feel free to either blog for therapeutic reasons—or to leave it. Well, and then there are some people who don’t have a choice because they somehow managed to win an award that contractually requires them to blog.

I can’t say I particularly enjoy blogging. For me, it’s hard work, and it really takes too long because I tend to revise a lot and spend too much time searching le mot juste. Having to write pseudo-HTML in some half-assed online editor doesn’t really help.

For example, I had been thinking about writing the Books vs. Blogs post for months, but the thought of having to either put up with the WordPress editor or do the cut-and-paste dance made me put it off every time. So you may wonder why I’m now blogging like there’s no tomorrow. The reason is org2blog/wp, a tool to publish directly from Org-mode in Emacs to WordPress blogs such as Hypotheses.

This means you can

  1. write in Emacs,
  2. write using concise Org-mode markup, and
  3. publish (including images) to the blog by the touch of whatever button you choose to bind org2blog/wp-post-buffer to.

This gives you all the power of Emacs and integrates your blogging with basically Everything Else™. Highly recommended.

org2blog.png

Figure 1: An Org-mode buffer associated with a blog doesn’t really look any different from any other Org-mode buffer. And that’s a good thing.


Author: Michael Piotrowski

Computational linguist, computer scientist, professor of digital humanities at the University of Lausanne.

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