Another metablogging post, but this may come in handy for people who like to produce blog posts in bulk and schedule them for publication in WordPress at a later date.

In my case, my ability to find time to blog is directly correlated to my workload in my day job. That’s why you see regular gaps in my posting that may last for a few weeks to a month or two.

I’ve recently blogged about adding TLS support to Emacs 24.5 on Windows and improving git performance on Windows by installing an alternative git command line client. The reason I ended up investigating how to add SSL and TLS support to Emacs is that when I originally upgraded from the official git Windows client to the Git for Windows build, I ended up with non-working TLS support in Emacs.

The TLS issues only occur if you tell the git installer to add git and all supporting Unix utilities to the path, which is not the default setting for a git installation on Windows.

The Windows build of Emacs 24.5 doesn’t ship with SSL and TLS support out of the box. Normally that’s not that much of a problem until you are trying to access marmalade-repo or have org2blog talk to your own blog via SSL/TLS.

Adding SSL and TLS support to the Windows builds of Emacs is easy. SSL/TLS support in the official Emacs build for Windows isn’t enabled because it doesn’t ship with the necessary support libraries, but you can get pre-built binaries from the ezwinports project on Sourceforge. Installation is simple - grab the desired binaries (I used gnutls, but there’s also an older openssl build available) and extract them into the root directory of your Emacs install. The directory layout is the same and mimics the standard Unix directory layout so everything ends up in the correct place.

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.

GNU Emacs 24.5 was released on April 10th. I’m in the process of setting up a dual boot Windows/Linux machine right now as I’m slowly moving away from Mac OS X, mainly because of the cost of the hardware but also because I don’t like it that much as a Unix-y development environment anymore.

Xubuntu 14.10 only comes with Emacs 24.3 and it looks like 15.04 will “only” include 24.4 so now is a good time as any to manually install 24.5. Please note this is not a complaint about Ubuntu and its many contributors. They do a great job, I’d rather have a stable system comprised of well-tested packages and install the exciting, cutting edge stuff manually.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m trying to improve my blogging workflow by using org2blog to draft my posts before pushing them to my WordPress blog. When I posted yesterday I had the basic workflow going, could edit posts in Emacs, save them, update drafts and push them to WordPress. The last piece that was missing was getting spell checking to work.

I’ve actually never spent much time thinking about spell checkers until I discovered that OS X doesn’t come with a spell checker that ispell recognises. A little research led me to Joel Kuiper’s blog post on spell checking in Emacs on Mac OS X. I decided to install Hunspell as it seemed to be modern, supported and able to do the job. Plus, it’s available via Homebrew which I’m already using to install other Unix software on my OS X machine. A quick

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.

I recently blogged about installing a 64-bit build of Emacs for Windows because I was dealing with a bunch of large and very large files.

While the 64-bit build definitely handled the really large files much better than the 32-bit build, there were still some performance issues. The main advantage of using the 64 bit build was that I could finally load a couple of files that I wasn’t able to load on the 32-bit build, but opening the files severely tested my patience.

Yes, I promise I’ll shut up about Emacs package management via ELPA any minute now.

Based on the feedback I had on my last post about using a combination of melpa and melpa-stable, I looked into using pinned packages via the package-pinned-packages variable that’s new in Emacs 24.4’s package.el. I couldn’t find any simple examples on how to use it, but a quick look at the source code and some playing around in ielm got me there. Well, after I finally upgraded to Emacs 24.4 on my main machine.

I’ve blogged about a little elisp snippet I use to install my preferred base set of Emacs packages before. Thanks for all the feedback, it definitely helped improve the code.

One issue that kept annoying me is that there is no simple way to tell ELPA to mainly pull packages from melpa-stable and only fall back to melpa for those packages I can’t get on melpa-stable yet. I decided to extend my code to handle that situation with some manual inputs as I know which packages can’t be found on melpa-stable. It proved surprisingly easy to do so after mulling over the problem a little.