Weblogger mode with Tag support

Right from May, all posts to this blog were made from Emacs. Slowly losing the habit of using the web interface. Thanks to the hard work of geeks out there, who have tweaked the weblogger.el to a greater extent. With the new version of Wordpress, and introduction of Tags, the main problem i faced with the weblogger mode in Emacs is the lack of support for the tags. Hence though the draft is created in Emacs, used to edit the blog posts once it is posted and add tags. Was searching for the weblogger mode with Tag support for wordpress. From the wordpress site found that it can be done specifying the tags in the mt_keywords in the metaweblog API. Thats all it ended there. Did not go beyond that.

After some time came across the link, http://blog.nethazard.net/emacs-weblogger-mode-with-wordpress-tags-support/ where the weblogger with the Tags support was available. From then, it has been a satisfying experience while i blog from Emacs. If i could find someway to type in Tamil, will soon try posting to my Tamil Blog from Emacs. Still without luck, :( If anybody is aware of some way to type in Tamil in Emacs, let me know.

Specifying categories for posts from weblogger

After all it is possible to specify categories for the blogs posted
from the weblogger mode in emacs. All you have to add is to add the
"Keywords" section to the header and specify the categories as comma
separated values. The only limitation is that, you cannot add any
new categories using weblogger.

If the header that you get is something like this,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
--text follows this line--

Add the "Keywords:" header and specify the existing categories,
something like,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
Keywords:
--text follows this line--

Now the only feature that is needed to make the configuration complete
is adding tags. Searching for ways to add that.

Using Weblogger mode in Emacs

Wow finally i was able to blog from emacs. First had thoughts ofwriting a python client using xmlrpc for posting in wordpress but thatwas all before i came to know about the weblogger mode. What has to be done to enable the weblogger mode in Emacs ? All you have to do is to download the weblogger.el and the xml-rpc.el to a directory of your choice and enable them. Once you downloadthe el files add the following lines to your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path "")
(require 'weblogger)

Now reload the configuration or restart emacs. Weblogger need xml-rpc and URL. If you have them  installed, Emacs would startup without any problems. Setup weblogger using the command, M-x weblogger-setup-weblog and enter the weburl, username and password. For wordpress the URL is http://yourblogaddress/xmlrpc.php

Now you are done, start blogging using M-x weblogger-start-entry.

There are still few loose ends to be tied up to make the webloggercomplete for my account. Still i am not able to specify the title and the category for the post. Hope to do that soon....

Test - Trying to post from emacs

Testing to blog from emacs. No idea about whether this will go
through fine. If you are reading this post, there will be a post
above this explaining the same.

cscope with emacs

During my college days i have never heard of cscope at all. The first tool that my mentor asked me to study was cscope as it is often difficult to read large source codes without cscope. I found it difficult to first use cscope since by default opens the source code in vi which i have never used. Heard that cscope can be integrated and gave it a try. It was not a difficult process at all. All you have to do is to set the EDITOR environment variable to emacs, so that cscope opens the files in emacs. You can safely set the EDITOR environment variable in .profile so that it is set every time you login. And for navigation you need to creat TAG table file for Emacs. Emacs has the solution in hand. All you have to do is to use the etags binary that comes with emacs.

The command ( etags `find . -name "*.[h|c]"` )  would create the TAGS file which emacs uses for navigating tags. Now to navigate `M-.` would take you the definition of a function or variable. `C-u M-.` would take you to the next definition. To return back to the original place where the search started the key binding is `C-u M-*`. There are number of cscope.el files available in internet which makes the navigation job easier but i did not try them as i was contented with this.

My Remembrall - Emacs Planner

Started using yet another feature of Emacs. The latest feature i am using is the Planner mode in Emacs. I was badly in need of a something to keep track of things as the silly little brain of mine was not able to keep track of everything. What i wanted was some sort of mechanism to remind me about the work i have and tasks that i need to complete. But what emacs gave was something different. Emacs Planner has a lot of features than what i expected. All you need to use planner in emacs is to download Planner and Muse and copy it into elisp folders or home folders and add configure your .emacs file to load planner. Planner requires the wiki feature of Muse so it is necessary to install Muse first. To get planner working for you, there is a detailed procedure starting from emacs installation to installing and configuring Planner. This link http://pigpog.com/node/1974 contains a step by step procedure to install emacs, install and configure planner and steps to use planner.

If the topic does not make sense to you, read this.