When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs.
However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily.
I then looked at Writely and Writeboard which fit the bill but are really intended for collaborative writing on the Web and don’t have any integration with Blogger.
The Qumana Blog Editor also looked very interesting as it includes integration with Blogger and built-in support for Technorati tags but still was essentially a cut-down Word lookalike interface.
Then I realised I had the perfect blogging editor sitting right under my nose all the time - Emacs. I can use all of Emacs powerful text editting features and simply save the draft text on my Web server using ange-ftp.
Adding Technorati tags is easy using Marshall Kirkpatrick’s BlogTags bookmarklet.
The only thing Emacs is missing is the ability to seamlessly publish to Blogger and another minor irritation is the fact that some whitespace gets jumbled when pasting the text into Blogger.
However, Emacs being Emacs, some kind person has created a Lisp package (weblogger.el) that provides integration with Blogger although I haven’t actually tried it yet.
And please don’t ask why I don’t use the Blogger for Word extension. I can simply think of nothing worse. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.