[HN Gopher] Babel is why I keep blogging with Emacs
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Babel is why I keep blogging with Emacs
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
Author : ibobev
Score : 145 points
Date : 2025-10-02 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (entropicthoughts.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (entropicthoughts.com)
| BeetleB wrote:
| Heh. I write my blog posts in org mode, and have a way to get
| Pelican[1] to read them. It doesn't support executing Babel
| source blocks on export - I should probably add that feature to
| my package.[2]
|
| [1]https://getpelican.com/
|
| [2]https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Dec/reintroducing-opel-
| put...
| zenmac wrote:
| have not seen pelican before, but went with zola. IMHO a binary
| distro is just much cleaner than the pip/uv/npm/yarn approach.
| And it is fast, and can auto rendered rss/atom.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I stuck to Pelican because it's Python, and thus easy for me
| to write plugins.
|
| And of course, it can do Atom/RSS.
| vunderba wrote:
| I started my blog with Pelican before migrating over to Astro.
| I enjoyed Pelican (Python based static site generator) for the
| most part but the theme system wasn't to my liking.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| I used to use org-mode with hugo but it got annoying, I didn't
| like how I needed to structure my org files, it kind of forced me
| into some structure. Now I use Zola with Markdown. I'm losing in
| power but it's so much simpler tbh.
| Arubis wrote:
| If you ever happen to go back, https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ has
| a couple different options for supported structures. I use it
| for https://dylanfitzgerald.net without much issue.
| dima55 wrote:
| I blog with emacs using the long-abandoned o-blog generator.
| Anybody have something better? Using the org-mode exporter, with
| working org-babel and equations and all that. This article
| doesn't go into the details.
| EnigmaCurry wrote:
| > Anybody have something better?
|
| I wrote this to publish Org docs to S3 -
| https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/s3-publish.el - I wanted
| something extremely lightweight, not even wanting to commit
| things to git like I normally would and waiting for CI to build
| something. Uploading html directly to S3 means it gets
| published in <1s from push.
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| That's neat! For org, if it had an option to generate the
| HTML file name from slugifying the org file name instead of
| the salted hash, it could be fantastic for rapid lightweight
| blogging.
| kstrauser wrote:
| o-blog in the parent comment reminded me that I use to use a
| similarly named SSG called blogofile, and what do you know.
| Small world.
| thecsw wrote:
| I was in the same boat for many years! Having started using org-
| mode for my website in 2018 [1] (just add index.org to the path
| to see the source), it grew into this massive pile of obscure gen
| and with my limited comfort level with lisp, turned into a scary
| smelling concoction of dozens of perl/sed/sh scripts that
| modified the output to fit my needs and have them do something
| fancy.
|
| But then, really, sat down for about 48 hours on a lonely weekend
| when everyone was away and wrote a simple static site generator
| [2] that takes exact same files and produces output that I fully
| understand e2e, becoming the project I'm most proud of.
|
| There are so many other generators I tried (hugo, jekyll, rails,
| asciidoctor, org-publish, astro), rolling up your own gives a
| sense of a stable foundation. Love your website! So clean. One
| thing that I'm thinking of adding (though I haven't touched my
| generator that much, I consider it "complete") is the dynamic
| execution of source code blocks.
|
| [1] https://sandyuraz.com
|
| [2] https://github.com/thecsw/darkness
| agentultra wrote:
| I mean that 2000 lines, I assume, is going to only be that many
| lines because it will have 20-50k lines of dependencies under it.
|
| It's not a bad idea to understand the software you use. A matter
| of where you want to spend your time. Learning about the org-mode
| internals is also a valid choice.
| ashton314 wrote:
| I write my blog (https://lambdaland.org) entirely in Emacs now.
| It's Hugo, but I use ox-hugo [1] to convert from org-mode to
| markdown and Hugo converts it to HTML.
|
| What I like about this: everything else I do is in org-mode
| anyway, so this fits my brain. I also have some nice org-mode
| tooling to make things like footnotes, margin notes, etc. look
| really nice.
|
| A little convoluted, sure, but I've seen worse. :-P
|
| [1]: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/
| Lownin wrote:
| It looks like Hugo also has native .org file support. Does ox-
| hugo provide functionality over Hugo's native org file parsing?
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Didn't know that Hugo supports org files. But just one
| example of added functionality is being able to use one big
| file with a subtree for each post.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It didn't back when ox-hugo was written.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I started using Hugo's built-in org support, but I found it
| quite limiting. I can't remember the specifics, but it
| doesn't support everything you can do with Markdown. So I
| quickly switched to ox-hugo. They can co-exist though so you
| can try the native support then switch if you run into the
| same shortcomings as I did.
| dima55 wrote:
| Does org-babel work? Do equations work?
| cyrialize wrote:
| I've also thought about using ox-hugo! I have (literally)
| organized my life in plain text, so I keep everything in org
| files.
| improgrammer007 wrote:
| HN and its obsession with org-mode
| projektfu wrote:
| FWIW, org's HTML export is about 4000 lines of elisp, and it is
| pretty well modularized.
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-mode/tree/main/item/lisp/ox-html....
|
| The publish front end is in
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-mode/tree/main/item/lisp/ox.el
|
| and
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-mode/tree/main/item/lisp/ox-publi...
| akkartik wrote:
| This works if your code snippets generate relatively static
| output. Lately I often need to create animations, often
| interactive ones. See https://akkartik.name/debugUIs.html, for
| example.
|
| In my life I've often switched to more manual tools when I notice
| that the more automated tool causes me to live within certain
| limitations. Sometimes it has taken me a decade to notice these
| limitations. Automation matters when I do something tens of times
| a day. But I publish a blog post once in tens of days. It feels
| worth some additional work to get a little more control and break
| out of ruts.
| m-hodges wrote:
| > Any lightweight markup format (like Markdown or
| ReStructuredText or whatever) allows for embedding code blocks,
| but Org, through Babel, can run that code on export, and then
| display the output in the published document, even when the
| output is a table or an image.
|
| This is what I love about blogging with Quarto.
| dzonga wrote:
| do people also realize you can blog with .txt files ?
|
| write a txt file, scp then let whatever server serve the files.
| interroboink wrote:
| Basically the .plan file revived (: [1]
|
| John Carmack was well-known for keeping his development notes
| and other thoughts in a .plan file[2][3]
|
| Aside: it saddens me a little how the simple idea of copying
| files onto a server is so many steps removed from modern "web
| framework" behemoths. I think some people genuinely don't know
| about the simpler older ways, and the pros and cons between
| them.
|
| [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/122782/what-is-
| plan...
|
| [2] https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
|
| [3] https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan
| facundo_olano wrote:
| I wrote my own org-mode static generator:
| https://github.com/facundoolano/jorge
|
| More robust than my previous emacs setup and much lighter than
| hugo. No fancy babel generation but I don't really need that.
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