If I really want to start hosting a blog that no one will read I need to set a few ground rules:

  • Be able to write the post using org
  • Have some way to play an attached song while reading
  • Have a banner image at the bottom like a terrible forum user tag

org-mode

Using org for writing is a bit of a no brainer for me. It's the primary way I write any extended or short form text. And more importantly it exports to anything!

If you want my terse pitch for org-mode, I've got a bit in my configuration for emacs that doubles as a “question”.

Unfortunatly I am not playing to it's strengths.

As of now I'm using a jekyll plugin called jekyll-org. Pretty straight forward.

However it's current gem is a version from 2019. I could use a git submodule if I cared enough to get the most recent commits, but I don't think that would solve the ongoing kinks that I run into my day to day of writing posts:

  • including content (with #+INCLUDE for example) from a seperate org-file does not render as you would expect
  • using liquid tags are very binary, a post either renders them or doesn't, there is no pick and choose
  • only the #+TAGS header parses as a list, can't have proper arbitrary header lists
  • when I include “no” in a document's title, say for example “noise”, it evaluates as false. Insane. I've used a zero-width space to workaround it for now (which is literally reccomended in the org-mode docs)
  • using #+ATTR_HTML to try an alter an image does not affect it's export

In the longterm I think it would be for the best to properly just use org-publish for my static generation. Or at least use something like this that lets you control the org document rendering before jekyll gets its hands on it.

Banner

As apposed to doing a simple image, I really wanted to have a proper sprawling, repeating, banner. Which is pretty easy:

<div
    class="box banner"
    style="background-image: url(/static/media/banner.gif);
           height: 40px">
</div>

and again in my org documents header arguments:

#+BANNER: stars.gif

Results in:

Simple.