2023-04-05





Releasing Orxite 1.0.1 (first release)
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  I've released Orxite — my static site generator based on [Emacs] and
  [Org-Mode] — as already promised [three days ago].

  The source is available [on Gitlab] and [on Github]. The primary site
  is, for the moment, Gitlab.


[Emacs] <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs>

[Org-Mode] <https://orgmode.org/>

[three days ago]
<~/my/glitzersachen2022/blog/2023-04-02_blogging-with-emacs-make-lisp.org>

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

[on Github] <https://github.com/m-e-leypold/orxite>

Unique selling points
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  Unique selling points of Orxite are

  • Comes with a minimalist style in the spirit of (I hope) [Brutalist
    Web Design]. By which I mean ["truth to materials"], not
    [intentional ugliness].

  • Has first class support for Org-Mode sources.
  • Has excellent support for mathematics courtesy of Org-Mode and
    [Mathjax].

  • Instead of a limited text template language uses [Emacs Lisp] for
    templating, thus giving the template and macro author all the power
    of Lisp for templating.


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

["truth to materials"]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_to_materials>

[intentional ugliness]
<https://blog.hubspot.com/website/brutalist-website-design>

[Mathjax] <https://www.mathjax.org/>

[Emacs Lisp]
<https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/index.html>


Lisp for templating
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  The latter point (Lisp for templating) deserves some illustration. A
  template in static site generators is basically only a function that
  is specified by giving a skeleton and identifying holes in the
  skeleton into which data is to be filled in from some context of the
  act of expansion.

  Lisp friends will immediately recognize a sort of
  [quasi-quotation/backquoting] from this description. Also XHTML is a
  tree, so the idea to do away with text templates and instead build
  Lisp data structures using backquote/unquote seems to be obvious.

  Orxite does exactly that, so a template in orxite might look like

  ┌────
  │ (defun my-template (content)
  │   (orxite-outer-template
  │    `(div/content.content
  │      (:h1
  │       (@ :id "title" :class "title")
  │       ,(@site :title)
  │       ,content))))
  └────


[quasi-quotation/backquoting]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)#Self-evaluating_forms_and_quoting>


Limitations
───────────

  Currently the major limitation is the time Orxite takes to process a
  site: A whopping /4 seconds/ on a pretty decent machine /per page/,
  due to the fact that emacs has to be invoked in batch mode twice per
  page.

  I know how to fix this already, but as things stand it is not high on
  my list of priorities.

  And the source code is not well documented (yet).


Comments
────────

  Due to legal pitfalls in Europe there is no comment section in this
  blog at the moment (sorry), but you can discuss this article or
  comment on its content ➡ [here on Mastodon].


[here on Mastodon]
<https://hachyderm.io/@glitzersachen/110146516899434532>