The question in the title refers to my blog, or I suppose more generally to my entire website. I’ve been publishing all of loomcom.com with Emacs for several years now and while I find it to be mostly acceptable, I’m by no means in love with it. There are a few major disadvantages:
- It’s almost entirely bespoke, meaning that if something goes wrong, I am literally the only person on the planet doing it exactly the way I do it, so it’s all up to me to fix it (In fact, I found a new bug when publishing this very entry…)
- The blog setup is brittle at best! It’s just a hack that treats ox-html’s sitemap feature as a blog publishing tool, and has no official support whatsoever.
- It’s surprisingly slow. Emacs is not the speediest runtime out there.
- It’s not as flexible as I would like, at least not without significant Emacs Lisp hacking. The Emacs org-publish system allows some customization, but not a lot. I’ve already done some Emacs Lisp hacking to get things to where they are, but my site still has that Signature Emacs Look.
- There’s no feedback in the form of blog comments. That’s both good and bad, I guess. Sometimes you don’t want to deal with comments and comment spam, but other times it would be nice to at least get some feedback, you know?
The other side of this is that moving the site off of Emacs and onto some other publishing platform would be a hell of a lot of work, with some back ends more work than others. No matter what back end I chose, I’d have to import all the existing content into some new structure, and then update the server to issue some 301 Redirects from the old structure to the new structure. What a pain! But, still, it might be worth it, just for future maintainability if for nothing else.
I’ll have to give this some extended thought before I decide what to do. In the meantime, here’s at least one more blog entry in Emacs!
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