More On Emacs Blogging

Friday, August 10 2018 at 5:40 PM

After much hacking on elisp, I’m happy to announce two changes: First, I’ve finally implemented pagination on my blog, so the entire nine years of archives isn’t rendered in one huge page. And second, there’s now an RSS feed available at https://loomcom.com/blog/index.xml. Woohoo!

Getting both of these features implemented was a bit of a challenge. The built-in Org-Mode publishing feature provided by ox-publish.el is very much geared toward publishing a single page. Really, it’s supposed to be for publishing a site map of your website layout. Using it to publish a blog is actually kind of a kludge and an abuse of the feature, to be frank. But here we are, that’s how most Org-Mode bloggers publish their blogs.

If you want to check out the Emacs setup for this site and blog, you can look here on GitHub. It’s a fairly complicated bit of hacking designed to work around the single-page limitation. I’ve also altered the default RSS backend, supplied by ox-rss.el, to filter out some unwanted noise from my RSS feed.

The only thing I can’t yet figure out is how to force Org Publish to always generate absolute URLs. I actually don’t think it’s possible, yet.