Octopress Tentacles

Maintaining multiple Octopress blogs with emacs

octopress-tentacle.el is an emacs facility for managing Octopress blogs. Its goal is to make it easier for an emacs-centric writer to create posts for multiple Octopress-based blogs and to upload to those blogs in fewer steps.

This chunk of elisp exists because, in classic engineer fashion, I didn't like the existing options. I want it to be better than other elisp that deals with Octopress in these ways:

• Portable: not tied to a single person's setup, nor tied to rvm or rbenv. The other elisp-octopress implementations I've seen have not done this.
• Extensible: I want this tool to support multiple blogs. I come from fandom culture as well as engineering culture. Engineers usually maintain just one blog, if any, but it's pretty routine in the fandom community for people to maintain multiple writing streams for different purposes. This is also where the name comes from: the Octopress octopus has many tentacles, and each could be doing something different.
• Graceful: the other elisp-octopress implementations I've seen are brittle and prone to leaving users looking at an elisp stack trace. I tried to make sure that this one tells you what it's doing via *Messages*, leaves notes when it falls over, and uses the Customize facility to make life easier for the user.

How to use it

• Put octopress-tentacle.el in a folder in your load-path and eval (require 'octopress-tentacle).
• Customize octopress-blog-registry or the group octopress and add information about the name and path of your Octopress blog(s). The other fields in octopress-blog-registry are not required - the package will figure them out on its own if you leave them blank.
• Invoke M-x octopress-make-new-post to create a new blog post.

Issues:

• I could declare a dependency on markdown-mode, but choose not to because editing Markdown content in text-mode is simple. Similarly, there are some tempting things in the cl package, but I tried to stay away from those.
• Currently I have no idea whether this works on emacs in a Windows environment, I would be happy to hear from ntemacs users on that point.
• Requires some customization - you have to enter a blog name and a path for `octopress-blog-paths', otherwise things won't function. Once a blog exists, the module will do its best to accomodate you and not make you customize further. It's infeasible to automatically locate Octopress installs or I'd try doing that.