HyperScience

Hello, Org

This is a test blog post for writing wordpress blog items using org-mode. I’m hoping this will let me populate my blog in a more seamless manner than editing it via the WordPress web interface.

Introduction

When Ι started this blog, I got an account with an ISP and installed WordPress using some kind of automatic template. The good thing about this is that I could start a blog without knowing what I was doing. The unfortunate part about it is that when I need to configure the blog, I have no idea whatsoever about how things are set up. Also, I would need to log in to the WordPress site and use their editor to build the pages.

But what I really want to do is use org-mode directly to upload posts to my blog. As I do most of my work documentation it would be awesome to convert some of that to my web site. Fortunately some awesome person has already done the work to make this possible. It’s called Org2Blog, created by Puneeth Chaganti, and currently maintained by Grant Rettke. It’s an org-mode package that allows you to edit posts using org-mode markup and extensions. You can edit and upload the post without leaving emacs, which is great!

The remainder of this post contains some fairly useless examples of this packages capabilities.

Examples

Figure 1 is an example of html import for images. One of the nice things about org-mode is you can specify different output parameters for images in pdf and html export formats. This can be handy for making things work in HTML.

avatar image

Here is an equation, in case you ever need to know the solution to a quadratic equation:

\[ x = -b \pm \frac{\sqrt{b^2-4 a c}}{2a} \]

  • Here are some points
    • \(\LaTeX\) is great to put inline into your blog, like \(\sum_{i=0}^n i^2 = \frac{(n^2+n)(2n+1)}{6}\)
    • Centered equations use two dollar signs, as opposed to inline equations like that above, which use only one

    \[\sum_{i=0}^n i^2 = \frac{(n^2+n)(2n+1)}{6}\]

I have not yet done much to see what can be done with org-mode and wordpress. There are several things I don’t know how to do. For example, to center the image above I had to set margins, and if I were to caption it, the caption would be left aligned. I also don’t know how to number equations. References would be the next interesting thing to try hruschka2010two. Well, it seems that citations from a bibtex file will export to WordPress, but the citation style, based on the key, does not seem to change (ie I can’t get numbered or superscript citations). Nonetheless, I’m declaring the export sufficiently capable to be useful for most blog posting purposes.

Bibliography

  • [hruschka2010two] Hruschka, O’Byrne & Kleine, Two-component Doppler-shift fluorescence velocimetry applied to a generic planetary entry probe model, Experiments in Fluids, 48(6), 1109-1120 (2010).

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