Chris Maiorana takes a lot of notes. He’s a writer after all. Once he’s taken those notes, he wants an easy and convenient way of viewing them. These days that usually means viewing them as a Web page.
Org mode, of course, has all the machinery in place to do this essentially automatically but Maiorana has some problems with it. He has multiple notebooks and finds it a pain to set up the ox-publish scaffolding for each one.
But this is Emacs so, of course, it’s easy to automate the process. Maiorana did that by writing a simple script, he calls OrgFolio, that
- Deletes the existing Web content
- Builds the scaffolding to export the Org files and exports them
- Copies any static content, such as CSS files
- Spins up a local Web server to show the content
All of this is kicked off from the command line with a call to Emacs in batch mode. It’s easy and has no overhead. It does require building everything from scratch,. which could be a problem for a large set of notes. That’s one of the reasons that Maiorana keeps a separate notebook for each topic.
I take copious notes about everything but they’re mainly for me so I see no need to export them to HTML. I’m perfectly happy to see them in plain text, just as I wrote them. That said, I do write them—complete with Org markup— as if they were going to be exported.
Still, if you take a lot of notes and would like to consume them as a Web page on your own private Web site, take a look at Maiorana’s post. His Elisp script is easy to read and modify if you want to adjust it for your own needs.