Show notes #1,234

This week has been fairly slow-paced. One thing you may notice is that this site has changed a bit. This is because the process for getting from some writing to a published post was quite involved, and also didn’t provide me with the kind of flexibility that i wanted. This is not to say anything against the soupault project, which is really wonderful; simply that the flexibility it provided and the goals it had were not always aligned with my goal, which is to have a no-frills blog.

After a short return to ox-hugo, which i was hoping i would be able to massage into using with something other than hugo, having had frequent issues with the complexity of hugo in the past, i wandered through github for a bit until i came across org-static-blog from Bastian. This is a small (around a thousand lines) emacs package that massages the built-in org-mode publishing functionality into something that can be used without too many kludges. Some of the default choices were not things i particularly liked, so i’ve made a few changes to my local copy to better fit my way of working.

One of the larger departures from Bastian’s package is how i deal with posts, pages, and drafts. The original org-static-blog defines a drafts directory, which contains posts that will be built, but not added to the post list. For some reason this didn’t work for me, and in any case moving files in and out of a drafts directory does not really suit my way of working. It also made the workflow for creating pages without a date, such as my friends page, feel a little hacky. So i copied the functionality of another little site generator, jorge. A page is a post if it has a date, and otherwise it’s just a simple page. It feels elegant, and so far is working well for me.

Anyway, that’s been the major change. If the update breaks anything, i’m sorry about that! Let me know and i’ll try to sort it as soon as possible. Stay wonderful