I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode power user - in fact, anything but - but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need including exporting to HTML. Exporting to HTML covers about 90% of my use cases. As much as I’d like to, LaTeX does not feature in my needs, but I needed to export an org-mode file for use with Microsoft Word. While there is no exporter directing into docx format, Microsoft Word can read ODT (OpenDocument Text) and guess what, org-mode does include an exporter for ODT. Problem solved, and I hope this information helps if you’re running into the same problem.

I mentioned in my previous post that I somehow had ended up with a non-working org2blog installation. My suspicion is that this was triggered by my pinning of the htmlize package to the “wrong” repo. I had it pinned to marmalade rather than melpa-stable, and marmalade had an old version of htmlize (1.39, from memory). The fact that marmalade is erroring out with an expired certificate is most likely a sign that I need to stop using it. Anyway, re-pinning htmlize to melpa-stable unclogged that particular problem and the updated org2blog flowed onto my machine.

Artur Malabarba over on Endless Parentheses has a short post about embedding a YouTube video directly from org-mode. I haven’t tried using it in org2blog yet, but I’m hoping/expecting that it’ll work there, too.

It’s a very timely post as I’ve got a couple of Emacs related short video tutorials planned that would really benefit from being directly embedded on the blog here.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I changed my blogging workflow to org2blog for writing and editing posts in Emacs and only push them up to my WordPress blog when the posts are almost done. I still do the final editing in WordPress so I can tweak the SEO settings and all that, but the majority of the work happens in org-mode now.

One area that really needed improving was the appearance of the source code that I put in posts. Before I started using org-mode for blogging I edited the code in Emacs, ran it through htmlize and pasted it into my blog post.. That way the Emacs theme I’m using also determined what the generated HTML looked like and it allowed me to control the code’s appearance to a certain extent. Once I moved to org-mode, I just got a generic htmlize output.

I try not to post too many metablogging posts. Other people do it better and I’m trying to focus on journalling what I learn as a software engineer and manager, not what tools I use for blogging. However after losing another post to WordPress’s built-in editor I decided Something Must Be Done. I think this is only the second post I lost, but it’s a fairly regular occurrence for a journalist friend of mine and I really don’t have that much time to retype blog entries that ended up in Bit Nirvana.