TLDR

Create a new folder
Put index.css, publish.el, and publish.sh in the folder

Introduction

I've recently fallen in love with org-mode, specifically when I use it with org-roam. I find the whole workflow of creating, tagging, and - later on - searching for information on my computer to be very elegant. On top of that, now that I have the time, I want to begin writing blog posts to better work out my thoughts. With both of these things in mind, I am again turning to the universal tool for human prospering: org-mode. This time, I want to see how it can help me turn a simple org file into a blog post on my website. My requirements are:

@@ -67,9 +67,9 @@ And that's pretty much it for now. Without further ado, let's jump into getting

Basic HTML File

As a pilot, we are going to use this org file that I am currently writing (hello.org) as our guinea pig. The goal is to have this org file be our very first blog post.

@@ -109,9 +109,9 @@ We then do a chmod +x publish.sh to make it an executable and run i

Disabling features that we don't want

The next thing will be to remove some of the generated items that I didn't ask for, namely the table of contents, author, section numbers, creation time stamp, and the validation link.

@@ -140,9 +140,9 @@ The next thing will be to remove some of the generated items that I didn't ask f

Styling & Code Highlighting

Next thing on our list is custom styling. This can be achieved by first installing the htmlize package from melpa / elpa. The EmacsWiki describes this as "a package for exporting the contents of an Emacs buffer to HTML while respecting display properties such as colors, fonts, underlining, invisibility, etc" (reference). If used "out-of-the-box", the buffer will be exported to HTML with all of the styles inlined (e.g. if you underline something in your org file, you will generate a <span style="text-decoration: underline">...</span>). However, we are more interested in styling everything by ourselves: we don't want htmlize making assumptions about what underlining means to us! Luckily, htmlize gives us the option to export with class names instead of inline styles so that we can specify each style for ourselves.

@@ -312,9 +312,9 @@ If we run the publish again, we can see that we have full styling on our code sn

Images

Our first two criteria have been met! Next on the list is solving images. As an example, let's use this squirrel image that I found online with an open source license. The ideal situation would be:

@@ -359,16 +359,16 @@ So what's the fix here? Well, we have two options, but I am going to go with the That's all there is to it! There are simpler ways as well, but that should do it:

Figure 1: A Cute Squirrel

Creation Date

Let's add the creation date below the title next. To start, we will modify the publish command to remove the title (:with-title nil) and, in its place, show a preamble bit of HTML that contains a formatted div with the title and the "last modified" span.z

@@ -427,9 +427,9 @@ Note that the downside of this is that the created date will change whenever you

Generating the Directory

For every org file in my _posts folder, I would like to create a link to the generated HTML file at the /posts.html page of my website. You can think of this as the "directory" of all posts. My criteria is:

@@ -489,9 +489,9 @@ If you open the sitemap.html file in your browser, you will see a b From here, you may customize it however you like. The following are my customizations.

Sitemap Title

I changed the title to "Matthew's Blog Posts".

@@ -513,9 +513,9 @@ I changed the title to "Matthew's Blog Posts".

Format blog entries in the list

I like to include the creation date on the blog posts. To do this, we can use org-publish-find-property to find the date property of the org file. Afterward, we can format a string that includes our formatted timestamp and the org-publish-sitemap-default-entry, which is just a link with the title of the post.

@@ -536,9 +536,9 @@ I like to include the creation date on the blog posts. To do this, we can use

Tags & Filtering

I use Org-roam for all of my note-taking and, in the next blog post, I plan to demonstrate how I will hook up my Org-roam note-taking workflow to my blogging. In the meantime, just know that we can add tags to the top of our org files like this:

@@ -758,9 +758,9 @@ Finally, let's append the following to posts/posts.css so that our

Conclusion

There are many more customizations that I plan to do on this system in the future, but I plan to leave this for now so that I can actually get to some blogging. I will proofread and fix my mistakes as time goes on, but this should be a good jumping off point for anyone interested in using org for their own blogging system.

diff --git a/posts/jul_28_2025.html b/posts/jul_28_2025.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b165948 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/jul_28_2025.html @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ + + + + + + +‎ + + + + + + + + +

+ UP + HOME +

+ +

+ Last modified: 2025-07-28 Mon 17:30 + RSS Feed +

+TITLE: Update July 28, 2025 +

What have I been up to?

+Whoops! I missed this month's update by a long shot, but I still want to get it out there before the end of the month. +

+ +

+This month was busy busy. I released v0.6.0 of miracle-wm which adds a bunch of new features, go and check it out if you haven't already! I am nearly finished with the sway/i3 IPC support and have big plans to wrap that up before the middle of August. There really isn't much more to go on that front so I might as well close that chapter. On top of that, the more interesting features of miracle that I have planned (e.g. some built-in shell integrations) are motivating me to wrap up the boring parts first. +

+ +

+Aside from miracle, I've continued to land a bunch of things in Mir recently around accessibility. The magnifier work is finally done, so go check that out if you use that feature in your day-to-day! I also did a ton of work to fix screenshooting on rotated displays. We were ignoring wl_surface::set_buffer_transform in a big way. Now that we're not doing that, your screenshots should like perfect every time! +

+ +

+Last but not least, the team has been making waves implementing multi-window in the Flutter toolkit. That's some really interesting and exciting work, so stay tuned for that if you're a Flutter developer! +

+ +

+That's all I got! I will make another post shortly, maybe once miracle v0.7.0 is out. Have a great rest of your summer/winter 🪐 +

+ + diff --git a/posts/june_08_2025.html b/posts/june_08_2025.html index 3683395..351d05c 100644 --- a/posts/june_08_2025.html +++ b/posts/june_08_2025.html @@ -26,9 +26,9 @@

What have I been up to?

Another month has gone by, so I guess it's time to see what I've been up to.

diff --git a/posts/may_06_2025.html b/posts/may_06_2025.html index 52854f8..1af22d2 100644 --- a/posts/may_06_2025.html +++ b/posts/may_06_2025.html @@ -26,9 +26,9 @@

What have I been up to?

I've been meaning to do these little blog-post type updates for a while, and I figured now is as good a time as any. So let's start :)

diff --git a/posts/sitemap.html b/posts/sitemap.html index f6e05fe..6105f8d 100644 --- a/posts/sitemap.html +++ b/posts/sitemap.html @@ -21,16 +21,25 @@

Matthew's Blog Posts

- Last modified: 2025-06-08 at 15:35 + Last modified: 2025-07-28 at 15:17 RSS Feed

+jul₂₈₂₀₂₅ created on July 28, 2025 +
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+update +
+ +
Update June 08, 2025 created on June 08, 2025
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update
@@ -39,7 +48,7 @@ update
Update May 06, 2025 created on May 06, 2025
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update
@@ -48,7 +57,7 @@ update
Hello, Org created on June 20, 2023
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technology,home
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