Some BlogMore Elisp

It's been a moment since I last wrote any Emacs Lisp code, at least anything non-trivial. I've tinkered with my Emacs configuration, I've tweaked the odd personal package here and there, but nothing fresh for ages. I actually can't remember what the last package was that I wrote.

But this morning I realised it would be handy to have a couple of functions in Emacs that let me start a new blog post, or edit an existing one. The code didn't need to be clever, just the bare minimum that gets me started; enough to reduce the friction when it comes to opening a new buffer and starting to write.

So blogmore.el happened. Like I say: nothing clever, it simply adds blogmore-new and blogmore-edit; the former starts a new post with the bare minimum frontmatter filled in, the latter lets me quickly pick an existing post and go edit it.

As time goes on I might expand on this. For example: it might be useful to have a command that updates the date frontmatter; perhaps another to add a modified¹; one to set the category from any of the categories I've used so far would be good; ditto the tags property.

I doubt this will be useful to anyone else, although I will try my best to keep it so that it's easy to configure, so it's only ever going to stay amongst my list of personal packages.

Which reminds me... this is the first personal package I've not bothered to add to delpa. That approach to managing my own packages made a ton of sense at the time, but Emacs has moved on since then. Thanks to use-package and :vc I can easily pull blogmore.el into any of my environments with a simple declaration in my .emacs.d.

(use-package blogmore
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/davep/blogmore.el" :rev :newest))

Given how simple and clean that is I'm minded to "retire" delpa and use this approach for all of my personal packages.