I am a graduate Student interested in Computer Security, FLOSS, and Programming Languages, so naturally when it comes to making a website I wanted to have a unique setup. netlify was the first suggestion for hosting, and I seem to agree with that sentiment. It’s free and builds the site based on updates to a git repo, which is really neat!

But that’s only one step in automation. I don’t want to have to do all the web design by hand! Well, that’s where hugo comes in. But you know, writing hugo config files seems complex. What if we were to remove that step in the process too?

At this point my FLOSS roots show. I am a big fan of Emacs and especially Org Mode, so I thought it would be fun to have a theme that was based off Org Mode. I remember seeing a theme like that somewhere, so I did some DDGing to try and find it.

That is when I stumbled upon this neat blog post: https://www.shanesveller.com/blog/2018/02/13/blogging-with-org-mode-and-ox-hugo/
I could build my website from INSIDE ORG MODE.

After a lot of fiddling and actually reading the documentation provided (this theme actually has some good documentation!), I am able to just write a post, save in Emacs, and it’s automatically built.

Combined with netlify, then I just need to commit my changes and push it up for it to be automatically served. Isn’t technology wonderful?

If you go to the source of this webpage (https://github.com/codysseus/website) you can see the very org file I used to build it!

“But why are you doing this in Org Mode” you ask, “Aren’t you duplicating the content of your website?”

Well, yes. And until I find a way to build it on netlify straight from the org file that will be the case. But this is more of a “Can you do it” kind of exploration. It wasn’t the most difficult thing to do, but it certainly is fun :)