org-static-blog

A few days ago I found Bastian Bechtold's wonderfully simple org-static-blog, probably after finding some wise words in his blog. org-static-blog is a simple Emacs blog exporter for entries written in Org mode.

Since I use Org every day, both in my free time and at work, it seemed natural I would want to write my blog entries in org-mode instead of Markdown. I considered for a while using Hugo's new Org parsing, but was charmed by the really simple org-static-blog, so I decided to do a few experiments.

First I made the HTML output validate, then, with a go-ahead from Bastian, I turned it into HTML 5. I also have a branch generating an Atom feed instead of RSS, but it isn't quite working yet.

There are some rough edges still, for instance how to handle relative paths in the feed, but it's promising. I also probably made a few mistakes in setting it up for my own blog because, for instance, the rendered date of the post seems to be included in the feed…

I converted my old Markdown posts with John MacFarlane's wonderfully generic pandoc utility. Actually installing pandoc on my laptop would install 128 dependencies and a total of 3 GiB of additional software! For a one-time job! Instead, I found James Gregory's pandoc Docker image which made the job quite easy. Well, that and a throw-away Go program that parsed the Hugo metadata into Org metadata.