markdown blogging in emacs

Blogging in Markdown from Emacs is nice. Most people, me included, start out by writing a file, running a processor on it (such as Pandoc) to get the HTML, then copying the HTML to the web form to publish.

There is a way to do it faster with a little .emacs hacking (I got here with some help from #emacs IRC, and probably there are better ways to do this, but still) :

(defun pandoc () 
  "Runs the contents of the current buffer through Pandoc and
   copies the produced HTML to clipboard."
  (interactive)
  (let ((fn (make-temp-file "pandoc"))
        (pbuf (get-buffer-create "*pandoc-output*")))
    ;; copy the contents of the current buffer to the temp file
    (write-region (buffer-end -1) (buffer-end 1) fn)
    ;; switch to *pandoc-output*, then return to the curr. buffer;
    ;; clean it, call pandoc on the temp file, copy to clipboard.
    (save-current-buffer
      (progn
        (set-buffer pbuf)
        (erase-buffer)             
        (call-process "pandoc" fn pbuf nil "--no-wrap")
        (clipboard-kill-region (buffer-end -1) (buffer-end 1))))
    (kill-buffer pbuf)              ; cleanup the buffer
    (delete-file fn)))              ; .. and the temp file
 (global-set-key "\C-cp" 'pandoc)

Now you can just type the post in a buffer, hit C-c p, switch to Firefox and paste the Pandoc output.