Org-Mode

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package. I only discovered his package a month or so ago and I’ve used it daily since. Put a URL in the clipboard, then in an Org-document run M-x org-web-tools-insert-web-page-as-entry and bam!, the page is converted into Org’s format and inserted as a heading in the current file. For example, here’s Jason Velazquez’s post about Blogging Platforms, all tucked away nicely in my “Blogging Platforms” Denote note… ...

I’m trying something new. I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can easily find things right within Emacs. A portion of these notes might be useful to other people. So I’m exporting the shareable notes from Org-roam as Hugo-compatible Markdown files. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. You can see the results at https://notes.baty.net and the details of how it works makes a good example. ...

I’ve settled on WordPress for this blog. (“settled” is a fluid word for me, but let’s assume I mean it for now). However, I prefer to do most of my writing in Emacs and Org mode. To help with this, I’ve configured org2blog and I’m writing this post with it. I’m using org2blog pretty much right out of the box. Just a single blog configuration with the following tweaks: <div class="org-src-container"><pre id="nil" class="src src-emacs-lisp"><span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-track-posts</span> <span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #b751b6;">list</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"~/org/baty.net/.org2blog.org"</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"wordpress"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-categories</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">"Misc"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-tags</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">""</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-show-post-in-browser</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #986801;">ask</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span></pre></div></code></pre> I haven’t figured out how to use authinfo.gpg for logging in automatically yet, so for now I’m typing my password in each new emacs session. ...

Org-roam continues to impress. I use org-roam’s “Daily Notes” feature every day as a frictionless place to put notes that may or may not need to be moved or otherwise dealt with later. It’s the Org-roam version of a similar feature in Roam. One thing about it I didn’t care for was that the Daily Notes .org files were starting to pile up in the root of my ~/org directory. Most of the time, file names and locations do not matter in org-roam. Everything is easy to find/browse right in Emacs. There are times, however, when I’m poking around in my org files using Dropbox or the Finder. All those daily files started getting in the way, so I decided to try moving them into their own ~/org/dailies/ folder. ...

It’s been a challenging week for me using Roam. For the past several days my Roam database simply wouldn’t load. I’d see the spinning Astrolabe forever. Deleting the site data in my browser and restarting would help for a time, but then it would happen again. What I’ve come to learn is that I need my Roam database available to me all the time. I understand that Roam is still in beta, but here we are. ...

I just learned that Org-roam supports aliases. This means that I can reference pages in my Org-roam database in more than one way. For example, I might want to have a page for “World War II” but when mentioning it I would just use “WWII”. It’s done like this… #+TITLE: World War II #+ROAM_ALIAS: "WWII" "World War 2" This is really handy. Even “real” Roam doesn’t support this as easily yet. ...