Notes on Blox and Org

Unenhanced Blosxom assumes that formatting within the body of an
article will be specified by the author by inserting HTML
tags. However, I want my article files to not only be used by
Blosoxom but to be directly readable by human beings as
well. Embedded HTML tags would make the files into unreadable messes.
But without the tags, Blosxom runs all the text in the article
together into a single long paragraph, which in many cases comes out
on blog pages as an unreadable mess.

<!-- more --> 

Enter blox. Blox is a Blosxom plugin that formats the text body of an
article before it's inserted into the blog page. It detects paragraph
breaks in the input text file and inserts appropriate HTML tags to
reproduce the same paragraphs in the generated blog page. This allows
me to write articles as plain text without tags, while Blosxom
displays nicely formatted paragraphs as I wrote them.

Almost.

Org-mode is an optional module for the Emacs text editor, my editor
of choice. Org-mode is designed as a personal organizer that stores
your schedule, to-dos, etc. in plain text files. Invincibly
disorganized, I still find org-mode very useful for working on normal
documents because it lets you do outline editing and formats simple
tables with a single keystroke.

The problem with using org-mode to write articles to be formatted
with blox and displayed with Blosxom is that both blox and org-mode
look for sequences of characters in the text file to figure out how
to process the surrounding text, and the some character sequence
trigger conflicting processing in blox and org-mode.

For example, org-mode considers a line of text that begins with one
or more asterisks ("*") in sequence to be a header, but blox
considers the same sequence to mark an item in a bulleted
list. Therefore when I use headers in org-mode to break an article
into sections, blox indents and puts a bullet in front of them,
making them look subordinate to the preceding text instead of
superior to the following text as I intended.

Alternatives for fixing the situation:

1. Give up org-mode for ordinary documents and adopt blox-compatible
   conventions. I lose outline editing and some other functions (but
   org-mode table formatting can be used with non-org files).

2. Modify blox to support org-mode conventions instead of or in
   addition to its own.

3. Modify org-mode to support blox conventions instead of or in
   addition to its own.

4. Figure out a way to use a more standard markup like Creole.