Chris over at Entropic Thoughts has some thoughts on blogging and Emacs. He’s conflicted. On the one hand, he yearns for a simple, static blog generator that he can understand. On the other hand, he uses Org Babel a lot and it’s an important part of his blogging workflow, which involves generating graphs in R for a lot of his posts.
He’d like to write a simple blog exporter that he understands and can modify but feels that it’s too hard to include the Org Babel functionality. I feel his pain. I use WordPress for Irreal and although it mostly works well, I sometimes wish I had a simple static generator that didn’t depend on a complicated infrastructure like WordPress. But every time I look into it, the effort doesn’t seem worth the gain and, as I say, WordPress mostly does a good job of meeting Irreal’s needs.
On the positive side, I do write my blogs in Org mode and have access to all its tools. Before my provider started blocking the XML-RPC protocol, I simply used Org2blog, which took an Org buffer and took care to exporting it directly to WordPress. These days I have a slightly more complicated process. I have a command that converts my Org buffer to HTML and saves it to the clipboard. Then I invoke WordPress and paste the HTML into its HTML input buffer. That’s not ideal but it’s pretty simple and I certainly understand it, at least until I push the WordPress publish button. Every once in while I try publishing with Org2blog because that is truly easiest way to go from Org to WordPress. Maybe I try that with this post.
In any event, it is possible to publish directly from Org even to a static blog fairly easily simply by converting the buffer to HTML and then doing whatever yo need to do to push it to your site.