Starting somewhere: minimalist blogging with org-mode

I have been thinking of starting a blog for a while, mostly to blog about technical stuff. Somehow that conversation always turned into a Brazil-type personal bureacracy.

Until I thought of using org-mode. I've never used it beyond note-taking, and even then I've only used a small subset of its features. Why org-mode? I suspect, ultimately, it is because of a severe case of NIH-syndrome and because it looked like a fun and interesting way of doing it.

This very document started as a prototype to check how well this would work. You wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't liked the results. One of my primary concerns, of course, was code highlighting, so I quickly pasted some code into the document to test it. Pay no particular attention to it.

(macroexpand-1 '(with-open-file (stream "/dev/urandom" :element-type 'octet)
         (read-byte stream)))

;; Macroexpansion:

(LET ((STREAM (OPEN "/dev/urandom" :ELEMENT-TYPE 'OCTET)) (#:G482 T))
  (UNWIND-PROTECT
  (MULTIPLE-VALUE-PROG1 (PROGN (READ-BYTE STREAM)) (SETQ #:G482 NIL))
    (WHEN STREAM (CLOSE STREAM :ABORT #:G482))))

Good enough. And now the inspiration for the domain name should be apparent, for the non-lispers, or the lispers who are not commoners. There were a few things I had to do though:

• I expected org-mode to automagically use my themes when exporting, like htmlize does. That turned out not to be the case, so I asked on #emacs how to deal with this (I hadn't even read the docs at this point), and was promptly pointed in the correct direction, which was using a custom stylesheet. That takes all of one line:

  #+HTML_HEAD: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style1.css" />

  Now that I had a custom style sheet, I went ahead and made further customizations. I'm not done exploring the aesthetics, but I've settled on something I like for now.

I still haven't refined everything, and I'm running all this on Gnu Guix, a system I don't quite understand yet. That's a story for another day, the point was to start somewhere.