This project has been archived.

Author

Roman Dobosz, gryf73 at gmail com

vimblogger_ft is a simple reStructuredText to Blogger interface through VIm.

As the name suggest it is a filetype plugin, which helps to create blog articles in rsST format and send them to blog site. It also provides commands for preview in browser and delete articles.

Module for communication was written in Python. So, VIm has to be compiled with +python.

Other requirements:

• Python (tested with version 2.6, should work also in others)
  • gdata
  • docutils
  • Pygments (optional)
• Blogger account

Download, edit the vba with VIm and type:

:so %

Or, clone this repository and put files in your ~/.vim directory.

This plugin is targeting for people, who has blogger account, want to use VIm for creating blog articles and don't really likes to manually do this in html.

Before starting writing a post, at least g:blogger_name and g:blogger_login has to be set up in .vimrc. Next, an article has to be written using standard reST markup, :Title: added (not required, but it's nice to have some title for a blog entry). Now, :PreviewBlogArticle can be used for saving generated HTML page into the file of the same name as reST file. Please note, that it'll silently overwrite existing file, because it is treated as a temporary file.

When article is done, :SendBlogArticle will send it to the server.

Output provided by :PreviewBlogArticle without any css stylesheet will look pretty raw, so it is generally good idea to grab stylesheets from blog itself, and tweak it a little, and add to list in g:blogger_stylesheets. They will be automatically linked to generated preview file.

Unfortunately, this script has several limitations, like it is impossible to use multiple blogs or edit existing articles without reST source files. It has to be somehow converted to reStructuredText, id of an article added to :Id: docinfo item and then updated. Id of an article is available through blogger account - every action for each post listed on Posting->Edit Posts has URL with query string item postID, for example:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=9876&postID=12345

See plugin documentation for configuration.

1. :PreviewBlogArticle - Generate article in HTML format, save it to the file with te same name as a reST source with .html extension in the same directory, and optionally opens it in browser. No connection to the blogger is performed.

2. :SendBlogArticle -Generate partial HTML document, which holds article, from current reST buffer and send it to the blog.

   See reST document structure below for further description.

3. :DeleteBlogArticle -Display list of articles, and lets user choose one (or none) of them to perform deletions.

It is assumed, that following template will be used:

:Id:
:Title: Title for the blog article
:Date:
:Modified:
:Tags: some, tags

Penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nulla
facilisis massa ut massa. Sed nisi purus, malesuada eu, porta vulputate,
suscipit auctor, nunc. Vestibulum convallis, augue eu luctus malesuada,
mi ante mattis odio, ac venenatis neque sem vitae nisi.

.. more

heading
-------

**Congue** mi, quis posuere augue nulla a augue. Pellentesque sed est.
Mauris cursus urna id lectus. Integer dignissim feugiat eros. Sed tempor
volutpat dolor. Vestibulum vel lectus nec mauris semper adipiscing.

Aliquam tincidunt enim sit amet tellus. Sed mauris nulla, semper
tincidunt, luctus a, sodales eget, leo. Sed ligula augue, cursus et.

reST document (optionally) starts with docinfo section (first several lines, that are starting from ":" character) separaded from other content with one empty line.

Docinfo items holds article attributes, and are updated automatically every each of upload to blogger, which is triggered by ":SendBlogArticle" command.

• :Id: - Holds article id on blogger side. If not defined, new article will be created (even if there is already existing one with the very same content). If wrong Id is entered (or an Id of deleted article), exception will be raised, and no action on blogger side will be performed.
• :Title: - Holds article title. Can be changed when :Id: is obtained.

• :Date: - This is published date in RFC 3339

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt format. If empty on first upload, it will be set to current date. Can be set/changed to desired date.

• :Modified: - This is read-only item, which store modification date which happens on blogger side.
• :Tags: - Comma separated list of tags (Labels). Can be empty.

All other items are ignored.

After docinfo block, article body should be placed using markup for reStructuredText.

Note, that .. more will became HTML comment <!-- more --> which will prevent from displaying entire post on the bloggers front page, but will not have any visible effect during preview in browser.

Additionally, if Pygments is installed, there is sourcecode directive, simple syntax highlighter using Pygments module. Very simple usage for Python code could be as follows:

.. sourcecode:: python

    import vim
    print vim.current.buffer.name

Note, that sourcecode directive requires argument with the name of the lexer to use. If wrong/non existent lexer is provided, it will fall back to text lexer. For more information about available lexers, please refer to Pygments documentation.

Directive sourcecode supports two options: :linenos: and :cssclass:.

:linenos: takes zero or one argument - if no arguments is provided, line numbers will be visible starting form 1. Provided integer will be the number of the first line.

:cssclass: can be use for changing default class name for block of code. Default class can be changed by appropriate option for plugin (see documentation), and defaults to "highlight".

It is possible to use VIm colorschemes like desert (which is distributed with VIm), Zenburn, Lucius, Wombat, inkpot or any other with Pygments. Assuming, that colorscheme desert should be used, there are two steps to achive it.

First, python module containing Pygments Style class has to be generated. There is apropriate convertion tool in Pygments distribution -scripts/vim2pygments.py. Uage is simple as:

python Pygments/scripts/vim2pygments.py [path/to/vim/colors]/desert.vim > desert.py

Which will create new python module desert.py containing class DessertStyle.

To generate CSS stylesheet, it's enough to:

python rst2blogger/scripts/style2css.py desert.py -c VimDesert > desert.css

VimDesert is the name of the class, which passed as an argument to :cssclass: option of directive sourceocode. It will be used as a main CSS class for code top <div> element. So, above example will looks like this:

.. sourcecode:: python
    :cssclass: VimDesert

    import vim
    print vim.current.buffer.name

Note: All headings for generated HTML by :SendBlogArticle will be shifted by 3, so the first heading will become <h3>, second <h4> and so on, to fit into blogger template (well, most of them). Remember, that HTML allow up to 6 level of headings, while reST doesn't have this limitation.