Better blogging with Emacs

Having got Emacs 22 set up with g-client I rapidly got annoyed with the necessity of continually copying and pasting URLs from a web browser window in order to post to my blog and to page through the posts available, so I quickly hacked together some ELisp to make it easier:

;;; Blogger support
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/g-client")
(load-library "g")
(setq blog-feed-url "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/<blognum>/posts/default")
(setq blog-feed-page-size 25)
(defun blog-post nil "Post to weblog" (interactive)
  (gblogger-new-entry blog-feed-url))
(defun blog-feed (&optional page) 
  "View recent weblog posts" (interactive "p")
  (let ((n (+ 1 (* (- page 1) blog-feed-page-size))))
    (gblogger-atom-display 
     (concat blog-feed-url
	     "?start-index=" (number-to-string n)
	     "&max-results=" (number-to-string blog-feed-page-size)))
    (message "Viewing blog posts from %d to %d" n (+ n blog-feed-page-size))))

Once you've set blog-feed-url to the correct URL for your blog, you can use blog-post to start a new page, and blog-feed to view your posts. A prefix parameter passed to blog-feed will view that page of entries: for instance, C-u 8 M-x blog-feed will view page 8 of your blog entries (entries 175 to 200, given the default setting of blog-feed-page-size).

Unfortunately, this still isn't ideal; what would be best is for gblogger-atom-display to display a list of blog entries in a buffer, with clickable view and edit text. Having to use an external program feels like something of a hack.

Also, I turned out to be right about the reason for not being able to post new entries; it was that I'd published too many in a short period of time, and had activated Blogger's anti-spam mechanism. Everything works fine again now. However, it would be nice if posting via the Blogger API gave you a meaningful error message rather than just throwing your post away.