Poor man’s Org mode time logging

I never really got used to MobileOrg, and all I really need to do frequently when I’m not near my computer is logging my working hours. Now that I found out that Vim Touch for Android works really well for me (I’m an Evil user anyway), I ended up with the following poor man’s solution:

1. I have an org.txt file in a Dropbox-synced folder.
2. To clock a task, I enter its title manually.
3. I insert a timestamp with C-t (or for Vim users), which I bound with the following .vimrc entry: inoremap =strftime("[%F %a %H:%M]")
4. When I’m back at my computer, I manually merge the (few) clocked tasks into my Org file.

Blogging from Emacs

There is a reason why I didn’t blog for a year: Being a person used to real text editors, I find it cumbersome to log into a web content management system and to enter text into a WYSIWYG HTML editor that always can’t do the things I want to do. I know there are workarounds, such as calling an external editor from the browser, but still…

So why not blogging externally to the browser altogether? Having become more and more addicted to the Emacs org-mode

• time tracker
• to-do list manager
• calendar
• publishing frontend
• address book
• personal knowledge manager

– just listing a few of its features in the order I learnt them! – I finally found org2blog, an org-mode extension that acts as a frontend to WordPress (and theoretically any other XML-RPC-enabled blog as well).

Those who have not used org-mode before, don’t worry: You can basically edit blog posts from within Emacs in a lightweight text-oriented markup language, but have full access to HTML if you need it. Posts can be edited offline and are stored as local files. There are keyboard shortcuts for publishing a file as a draft or post.

The only shortcoming I have perceived so far is that you have to tell org2blog explicitly about the blog site you want to log into.

So there is hope that there will soon be some more posts again.