Starting a blog
Nov 25, 2024I've tried blogging before. All the attempts ended up following a very similar pattern: Took me a veeeery long time to write a single post and after that I never looked back at it again.
This time I'm trying things differently. I'm not going to start from the perfect blog post.
The home page
My website is as simple as it can get.
The index file is just HTML and CSS, nothing else. Even the list of recent posts is done manually.
The Posts
This very post is written as an Org-Mode file. For those who haven't
heard of Org-Mode before, checkout their website. Long story short,
Org-Mode is a text-based document format. From that perspective, it
could be compared with Markdown. The difference is the ginormous
feature set that Org-Mode supports compared. Including, but not
limited to, many output formats and an incredible interactive
experience.
HTML is one of the output formats that Org-Mode supports. Each post
written in an .org file will be translated into an HTML page.
This feature is built into Org-Mode. It just takes a bit of
configuration.
Org-Mode Publishing
Being completely honest, the HTML publishing feature doesn't seem exactly designed for the blogging use case. It took quite a bit of tweaking of the configuration to get it to do all the things that I wanted.
Although a single document can be exported to HTML, in order to apply the same configuration to various files, I was required to create a project with a source directory and an output directory.
The cool thing about this project thing was that I could have different groups of settings and aggregate them all under a single project.
Operating the blog
From now one, I just have to execute the command C-c C-e P p to
ask Org Publishing to generate the HTML file of all the org files that
have been updated since I last executed it. It feels quite
convenient, I have to say.