Blogging with Emacs and git

In Emacs, you can write your blog in org-mode, then export to HTML with a script which uses ox-publish. This should be built into Emacs and you can include it in your script with a require

(require 'ox-publish) 

You will need to set up the variable org-publish-project-alist, which contains a list of lists (list of projects) like so:

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      (list
       (list "site"
             :recursive t
             :base-directory "./content"
             :publishing-directory)))

The above is a very rudimentary example, and will likely not include all the features you want in your blog. Other options you may be interested in include generating a sitemap which you can use as an index. There are other options you may want to turn off. You can make as many projects in here as you like: I have a separate project for my posts, about, static files and RSS feed.

If you don't like the default CSS you can include a stylesheet in the head of the exported HTML. Investigate the variables org-html-head and org-html-head-include-default-style. Other variables which may interest you are org-html-preamble-format and org-html-postamble-format. These variables should all be documented inside Emacs and can be accessed with C-h v, but make sure you have required ox-publish so that you can find them.

With your projects set up you want to build your site, which you can do with just

(org-publish-all t)

Then you can call the script with emacs -Q --script foo.el, where foo is your build script.

You can see my build script if it helps. This blog post was also very useful for me to set up an RSS feed and better understand the publishing system.

This site is (at the time of writing) hosted with Github Pages, so it is convenient for me to store my org content in the same repository as the HTML output. Unfortunately, at the time of writing I cannot simply specify that I would like the root of the site to be a particular folder on the master branch.

I can however specify which branch to use, so I have a gh-pages branch which is a copy of the public directory on the master branch.

We can use git subtrees to manage this, as I believe this is much simpler than using submodules. From the root of your blog, i.e. above the public directory, you can use

$ git subtree split --prefix public --branch gh-pages

to create a new branch called gh-pages. If you need to delete that branch you can use git branch -D gh-pages. When pushing changes to github, make sure to push your new branch to origin/gh-pages or whatever your equivalent may be. Also make sure to tell github to use that branch as the root for your site.