Blogging with Emacs, Org-Mode, Make and Lisp

The problem

This blog is a static web-site. For the last year I have been using Hugo to build the HTML-pages, but I have become more and more dissatisfied with the results:

1/ The theme I developed for Glitzersachen with Hugo — Brutalist-Minimalist — felt more and more not quite right. I am hard pressed to pin-point exactly what bothered me. But it definitely rubbed some of my esthetic sensibilities, and also was not quite minimalist enough.

So this was a already motivation to develop another theme. If everything else would have been OK, the new theme would have been a Hugo theme again, but I also developed some issues with Hugo.

2/ Hugo has its own templating language. Supposedly it is derived from some standard Go string templating system. But in the end it is another fringe domain specific language that makes it difficult to do uncommon stuff in the language itself.

Generally, all those templating languages are pet peeve of mine. I don't like them, and will soon write about what I consider the better alternative. Spoiler: A real, general, programming language can cover all my templating needs and allows more general processing while expanding a template.

3/ Hugo has its own — probably very good, but ultimately difficult to comprehend — system to structure source and do the processing. It is often not clear to me what has to be done that a source file (not text, for example an image) in format X arrives at the site in a processed format Y.

Maybe that requires wrapping the Hugo invocation a number of additional scripts anyway.

A Make based system on the other side would allow the user to add rules and additional dependencies to the final target and employ tools they already know well.

4/ Generally, Hugo is not extensible. There is definitely no way to tell it to process the argument of a macro in an external tool (e.g. PlantUML).

My general impression is, that Hugo is not a system for Hackers. It is a bundle of solutions for people who want to do the usual thing, but nothing that is extensible in a way that one can build a complete authoring system on it with formats (embedded or text external) that the Hugo authors have not though about supporting (e.g. PlantUML or Mermaid).

The advantage, of course, is, that it is portable between Posix systems and Windows — which most applications are not. On the other side, this is decidedly not my use case, so I do not profit from this portability.

I'd generally assert that the integration of Hugo into the tooling of the system on which it runs is practically nil, so the power of that tooling is lost to the user.

5/ Org-Mode source is definitely only second class citizen with Hugo. Unfortunately I am writing my notes almost exclusively in Org format, so there is a certain additional effort involved in publishing something on the blog.

Also, my indexing and notes organization relies on properties of the Org format. If I write blog articles in a different format, they will not be registered by the indexing.

Again, there are ways around that, yes, but why should I bother, given that I can have a blogging system that uses Org files as first class citizens?

And a solution

My solution so far:

  • Lisp is actually a very good templating language in itself. We don't need string based templating. And above all not these strange inheritance mechanisms from Jinja or Mako.
  • Make is a pretty good tool to automate the production of files from sources. It also has the additional advantage that it is — due to its rule based nature — easily extensible.
  • Emacs can (for the moment) do the heavy lifting of parsing and converting Org files to HTML.

So I rolled by own static site generator after some superficial research if something similar to the system I envisioned was already available (it was not).

My site generator is called Orxite (a play on the word Org-Site) and will be available at gitlab.com/m-e-leypold/orxite some time in the near future.

I will also blog in the near future about the ideas it tries to implement.

Comments

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