English: org-mode logo: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-faq.php#unicorn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Updated 2014-10-29: I no longer use Windows Live Writer. I now use Org2blog (thanks to this thumbnail code!) or the WordPress web interface to write and update my posts.

I would love to be able to write all of my blog posts within Emacs. I like the outline tools and simple markup of Org Mode. Org Mode and org2blog are invaluable when I’m writing a post with lots of code or keyboard commands, because it’s easy to set up syntax highlighting or add teletype text. Here’s an interesting self-referential example of org2blog’s power that uses #INCLUDE to include the Org blog post source in the post itself.

If I expect that a post will have lots of images, I tend to use Windows Live Writer because it takes care of resizing and aligning images, linking to the original size. Because it uses my blog’s stylesheet, I can get a sense of how the text will flow around it. I can quickly draw an idea in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, copy and paste it into Windows Live Writer, and then resize it until it feels balanced on the page. Sometimes I draft a post in Emacs and then open it in Windows Live Writer or ScribeFire so that I can add images.

Org Mode also supports images, but it’s not as easy to resize things there. If I wrote a function that used ImageMagick to save the clipboard image to a file, resize it to the appropriate dimensions, and link it to the full-size image, maybe that would do the trick. Still, that sounds like it would be a fair bit of work. Maybe someday. Hmm – any chance someone reading this blog happens to already have that snippet handy? =)

If I need to edit an existing post, I either use the WordPress web interface or I use ScribeFire. That way, I don’t have to fill in the post publishing date again.

It’s a bit of a patchwork system of different tools, but it does the job. What’s your workflow like?