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/june_08_2025.html b/posts/june_08_2025.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3683395 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/june_08_2025.html @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ + + + + + + +Update June 08, 2025 + + + + + + + + +

+ UP + HOME +

+ +

Update June 08, 2025

+ Last modified: 2025-06-08 Sun 15:30 + RSS Feed +

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. +

+ +

+Canonical hosted our company's sprint in Frankfurt, Germany during the month of May. It was a very productive time for the whole team. I always enjoy seeing everyone in person, talking through big issues face-to-face, and exploring a new city. I also got to spend some time in Zurich, Switzerland before the sprint began. Zurich is pretty awesome 🏔️! +

+ +

+In miracle-wm, I have been going down quite the rabbit-hole🐇! What began as a plan to fix the remaining warnings in the source code has snowballed into me implemnenting the rest of the IPC mechanism and testing the entire thing. This has been no small feat, as both sway and i3 implement a lot of different commands, and a failure to implement any one of them often leads to half-broken clients. I've had to make some "executive" decisions to ignore parts of the protocol that I deem irrelevant now (especially many of the X-specific bits), but it is a mostly compatible implementation. The good news is that I've nearly completed this journey and should be ready to release version 0.6.0 some time in the middle of June. +

+ +

+Miracle is getting closer-and-closer to my vision of it every day. The only problem right now is finding the bandwidth to implement everything that I have in my head :) +

+ +

+On the Mir side of things, I am still implementing the magnifier glass accessibility feature from before, but with a much-improved technical direction that we arrived at during our time in Frankfurt. Unfortunately, this required a quick detour to properly implement the overlay_cursor flag of zwlr_screencopy_manager_v1::capture_output_region, as both screencopy and magnification rely on this same code path. The good news is that I'm quite close on this and it should be landing in full any day now 🤞 +

+ +

+I also fixed this very breaking bug that was actively preventing miracle from rendering on my second monitor, so that's good. +

+ +

+On addition to these two projects, I am also reinvolving myself in the Flutter multi-window work. For those who don't know, we're trying to make it so that the Flutter toolkit can render to multiple surfaces. This is no small feat, as Flutter was originally written with the assumption that only a single "view" would ever be drawn too. However we've managed to make some great progress on it thus far, and we're very excited to land the first pull request imminently with the help of the folks over a Google! +

+ +

+I hope you're having a great and productive summer 😎 +

+ + diff --git a/posts/may_06_2025.html b/posts/may_06_2025.html index 713eb17..52854f8 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 680b7c8..f6e05fe 100644 --- a/posts/sitemap.html +++ b/posts/sitemap.html @@ -21,16 +21,25 @@

Matthew's Blog Posts

- Last modified: 2025-05-22 at 09:02 + Last modified: 2025-06-08 at 15:35 RSS Feed

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