Running Orxite 2 now
════════════════════

  In the last two weeks, I have prototyped /Orxite 2/, the second
  generation of the /Orxite/ static site generator based on emacs lisp,
  shell scripting and /make/.

  Since yesterday, the site on [glitzersachen.de] is generated by
  /Orxite 2/.

  /Orxite 2/ is available (without a specific release yet) from
  [codeberg.org/m-e-leypold/orxite2]. (All my software will move out
  from Github and Gitlab within the next months, but this is another
  story).

  In some ways /Orxite 2/ is a step back in achievements from /Orxite
  1/.  /Orxite 1/ — announced [here] and still available from [Gitlab
  here] — promised:

  • Templating in a proven (more or less) main stream language, instead
    of a fringe templating language (like /gohugo). /Orxite 1/ employed
    emacs lisp as templating language.

  • Getting relative links right. A bundle of rendered HTML pages can be
    browsed from disk without an intervening web server.

  • Automatic perma-links.

  • Extensibility of site building via the well-known (and loved) /make/
    utility. As opposed to e.g. /gohugo/ which is either impossible to
    extend or makes it only excruciatingly difficult to extend, but
    definitely doesn't want external tools integrating with it.

  Unfortunately /Orxite 1/ disappointed in some aspects:

  • It was definitely too slow because it rendered pages one by one,
    starting a new emacs instance for every single page, instead of
    rendering all pages in one go by using `org-publish'.

  • The extensibility did not materialize for the awkward internal
    architecture.

  • Furthermore for minimalist web sites (like /Glitzersachen/) adhering
    to /brutalist web design/ as explained by [David Bryant Copeland] on
    [brutalist-web.design], a full templating framework is totally
    overblown. It turns out, what is necessary is only a mechanism to
    prefix and suffix some content to the pages, and the rest can be
    styled sufficiently in CSS.

  And then in the year since I published /Orxite 1/ additional
  requirements accumulated which I found hard to integrate into the
  /Orxite 1/ architecture (if I might be so bold to call some
  organization principles for scripts and architecture — but then I have
  heard people calling the most absurd things architecture, so I will be
  so free):

  • A central metadata database that allows tools to pull from the page
    metadata.

  • Sub-sites (e.g. for books embedded in the site) which get different
    headers and footers, maybe even different styling.

  • Integration with [Org-roam], that is, blog articles and web page
    sources are (or can be) /Org-roam/ notes and can be opened from
    /Org-roam/.

  • And again: Extensibility preferably with shell tools.

  I am happy to say /Orxite 2/ delivers in most of these points already
  and looks very promising in the others:

  • Templating is done via the shell. This is the step backwards I
    already mentioned. But consider that templating is basically the
    ability to produce a string from a number of arguments that are
    placed into a "string with holes". The shell knows only strings as
    data type and the quoting/unquoting plus variable expansion is
    basically already a templating mechanism.

  • Permalinks and the relative links work as with /Orxite 1/.

  • Everything is controlled by /make/.

  • Integration with /Org-roam/ works, but requires a specific
    configuration of /Org-roam/ that is outside of /Orxite/.

  • A recutils based metadata database for the pages is generated and
    maintained by the /make/ rules.

  • Page configuration is done by the org /SETUPFILE/ mechanism and this
    allows configuring different headers for pages that belong to an
    article series (e.g. a tutorial on shell-programming).

  • Every page is also available as text rendering (see the link under
    /TXT/ in the page footer).

  Furthermore, what is already in reach (though only prototyped outside
  of /Orxite/ so far) is:

  • Rendering an article series to a book, handout or slide show.
  • Rendering pages into different formats like PDF.

  There are unfortunately no installation instructions for /Orxite
  2/. You can look at the sub-directory /example-site/ and extrapolate
  from there. And you will need [GNU Recutils].


[glitzersachen.de] <https://www.glitzersachen.de>

[codeberg.org/m-e-leypold/orxite2]
<https://codeberg.org/m-e-leypold/orxite2>

[here] See file 2023-04-05_orxite-1.0.1.org

[Gitlab here] <https://gitlab.com/m-e-leypold/orxite>

[David Bryant Copeland] <https://naildrivin5.com/bio/index.html>

[brutalist-web.design] <https://brutalist-web.design/>

[Org-roam] <https://www.orgroam.com/>

[GNU Recutils] <https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/>