Fire up GNU Emacs.

Then hit C-x C-f ~/my-blog.org RET to create a new Org file named my-blog.org.

In this file, hit M-RET to insert a new heading. Type something sensible as the title of your next blog entry:

* My first blog post with Emacs and Org!

This will be the content of my blog entry.

You're done.

You need to publish your Org page somewhere in your computer.

So let's create a public_html/ directory in your home directory:

~$ mkdir public_html

Now edit your .emacs.el file and add this Emacs lisp snippet:

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      '(("blog"
         :base-directory "~/"
         :html-extension "html"
         :base-extension "org"
         :publishing-directory "~/public_html/"
         :publishing-function (org-html-publish-to-html)
         :html-preamble nil
         :html-postamble nil)))

The code above defines a HTML publishing project with no preamble and no postamble. (To learn more on publishing projects, please read the Org manual.)

Evaluate this code by hitting C-x e at the end of the last parenthesis.

Now hit M-x org-publish RET blog RET anywhere in Emacs to publish the project.

Your public_html/ directory now contains a new file, my-blog.html, with a HTML export of your my-blog.org file.

You want to publish this page as a RSS feed so that readers can subscribe to it. (Yes, my own definition of a blog is that simple: some HTML content and a feed.)

You are three steps away from having a blog—you only need to:

1. load ox-rss.el to enable RSS publishing;
2. create a RSS publishing project;
3. add some RSS-related info in your HTML publishing project.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/install/git/org-mode/contrib/lisp/")
(require 'ox-rss)

(add-to-list 'org-publish-project-alist
             '("blog-rss"
	       :base-directory "~/"
	       :base-extension "org"
	       :publishing-directory "~/public_html/"
	       :publishing-function (org-rss-publish-to-rss)
	       :html-link-home "http://mydomain.org/"
	       :html-link-use-abs-url t))

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      '(("blog"
         :base-directory "~/"
         :html-extension "html"
         :base-extension "org"
         :publishing-directory "~/public_html/"
         :publishing-function (org-html-publish-to-html)
         :html-preamble nil
         :html-postamble nil
         :html-head-extra
         "<link rel=\"alternate\" type=\"application/rss+xml\"
                href=\"http://mydomain.org/my-blog.xml\"
                title=\"RSS feed for mydomain.org\">")))

Okay, you now have a single file, with a RSS feed that points to headlines in this file. But what if you want to allow readers to comment your blog posts?

In this case, you need to have one page per blog entry and to use something like disqus.com to enable comments on this page.

This is perfectly fine!

Just write your blog posts in dedicated .org files, then use the my-blog.org file as a collection of summaries of your blog posts. At the end of each summary, put a link to the Org page where people can comment.

Then update your RSS publishing project like this:

(add-to-list 'org-publish-project-alist
             '("blog-rss"
	       :base-directory "~/"
	       :base-extension "org"
	       :publishing-directory "~/public_html/"
	       :publishing-function (org-rss-publish-to-rss)
	       :html-link-home "http://mydomain.org/"
	       :html-link-use-abs-url t
	       :exclude ".*"
	       :include ("my-blog.org")))

Note the options :exclude and :include—they say: "Don't publish .xml files for all .org files in the base directory, only publish a .xml file for my-blog.org."

This setup may sound weird first, but I find it useful on the long term: quick thoughts get directly in the main my-blog.org file, and longer blogs have their dedicated pages, with comments allowed.

Of course: you can do a lot more than that—here is a quick list:

• embed pictures;
• embed arbitrary HTML code;
• embed code snippets (zero headache to get syntax highlighting);
• tweak your RSS publishing project to skip TODO headlines
• use timestamps for drafts that need to be published later;
• etc.

If you are not afraid of raw code with too few comments, you can dive into my .emacs.el and grab hints from my configuration.

• Writing in Emacs is just pure delight.
• Blog posts are now part of your Org agenda.
• If you already have a habit of taking your notes in Org, then you'll more easily take a habit of publishing blog posts from these notes.
• Since Org files are plain text, storing a blog as a git repository feels natural: people can contribute your blog with… patches.

ox-rss.el is not very well known so far, I hope this blog post will encourage people to use it! Let me know if something is not clear.

You need to use Emacs version 24.2.1 (or later) and Org 8.0 (or later).

Thanks to Sacha Chua's post here about blogging with Emacs, as this triggered me to write this post! Her post is worth exploring for the links it contains to other Emacs-based solutions I didn't mentioned here… but I'm sure you'll discuss them in the comments.