So it has come to this. I'd like to know what the hell I actually do all day, so maybe keeping a record will make that more clear. Today, I started a blog! I had some ideas about the publishing system I wanted going in, and finding that system was interesting. Requirements:
- Editing in emacs with org-mode
- Publishing with a simple file copy (or git push, etc)
- Static pages; no server work other than sending the files
- No javascript; no client work other than basic rendering
- Premade templates so that things look reasonable out of the box
- Does not require me to actually learn web development
Turns out you can't have everything, but you can get close. In its simplest, org itself can push HTML without anything else. This is minimally-styled, and not assembled into pages that talk to each other. The org-mode wiki (worg) has a list of various publishing systems that use org as a backend: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-blog-wiki.html. There are several exporters to common blogging platforms, and a few specially-written things.
In the end, I was looking at two systems: o-blog and org-page. Both are blogging systems, so you get RSS, tags, timelines, etc.
Advantages of o-blog
- Neither o-blog or org-page are used heavily, but o-blog appears to have more users: I could only find one org-page site that wasn't the author's personal page
- Org-page feels a bit rougher than o-blog, which has a much nicer-looking layout out of the box
- Org-page feels more boilerplaty. Each file needs lots of tags that could potentially conflict
- Org-page has some sort of git integration, which maybe is actually a positive, but I didn't dig into it. The main publishing function takes some git refs, the system expects a particular branching structure, etc. Those are probably good, but it should be obvious what the basic export-all-this-stuff command is
Advantages of org-page
- Org-page organizes the posts into several files, while o-blog has the whole thing in one file. With o-blog this probably will get slow as the posts accumulate. The author is currently working on an update that supposedly would resolve this
- The major downside of o-blog is that it produces a very heavy, javascript-laden site that doesn't work at all with JS turned off.
I was leaning towards o-blog, so I learned some web-development. O-blog uses LESS instead of CSS, using some runtime javascript to convert the LESS (that the browser doesn't understand) to CSS (which the browser does understand). So I exported the LESS to CSS, scrubbed the output to get rid of the shinier bits, and I have my blog. This look reasonable, but still not ideal. Current issues:
- The new JS-free navigation bars I wrote disappear when the browser window is narrower than some threshold. This is almost certainly intentional in the CSS. It needs to do something better than simply disappearing. The JS version did do someting better, and I should try to match that
- O-blog renders equations with MathJax, which uses javascript. Org has the capability to generate images for each equation, and output those. I'd like to do that, but o-blog can't figure that out. I'll fix it at some point
- Tables look somewhat weird. Pretty sure this is an org feature (not o-blog). On opera I see a full grid, except the left bar. On firefox I see the top and bottom bars and no others.
There're probably more, and I'll discover them as I go. In the meantime, the code and content are on Github.