I have used jekyll in the past to maintain my home page. It's been nice really, but extending jekyll was painful. At times, working directly on the system is easier than writing plugins. I do concede that the above purported pain was more because of my requirements instead of insufficiency of jekyll as a regular blogging system. What I wanted to do with jekyll was to:
- write posts in org
- have a tree-ish file structure (mimicking my local files)
- run code blocks inside the org files
I actually tried to work on all these three issues by writing little ruby plugins and helper elisp scripts, but it was not really worth the time since, at around the same time, I started looking into org-publish which offers everything and more.
The set of pages here mirror a small section of my messy org directory (I am still figuring out how to work efficiently with my private files. Probably something like org-brain might help). Other than the org files themselves (which are here), there are three pieces that assist in publishing:
- The export setup file which attaches css/js scripts and provides the general export config.
- Theme for the pages. This is a slight variant of my old blog's theme. Since I use it at other places too (at least one), it's now in a separate repository.
- Elisp package for working with and publishing everything.
There are a ton of places from which I have taken inspiration (both ideological and programmatic). I might not recall all of them but here are some:
- org-wiki and org-brain packages.
- Personal website and wiki in org posts by thibaultmarin made me realize the capabilities of org-publish.