Using Hugo and org-mode for a blog

I've been writing bloggy stuff for years, but never had a great way to share it. For a while I was pretty excited about using my own instance of Mediawiki. I wrote hundreds of pages of rambling nonsense, intricately linked, categorized and tagged, and put it online. I set up a bunch of custom templates, code syntax highlighting, and LaTeX support, among other things - Mediawiki has a great selection of extensions. I even had a grand plan for building an auto-updating mind map from page categories.

Back then, my main goal was to capture ideas electronically, and that system worked well. Even the editing interface was nice, with a source/WYSIWYG toggle, formatting and syntax help, and a customized toolbar for snippets and templates. But it was a web interface, which eventually started to feel cumbersome (slow feedback cycle). Plus, the years of maintaining a php app on a cheap shared server were starting to take their toll. I don't remember if it was the stylesheet breaking, or my general loss of patience with the app, but for some reason, I eventually stopped updating it.

Ever since, I've wanted to get that content back up in a more digestible form, backed by a more robust system. I'll probably backdate it to create the illusion of continuity. I've also written plenty of new stuff, which is sitting in piles of text files waiting for a home.

The secondary goal was to make sure the capturing was done in some variety of plaintext. In Mediawiki, it was wikitext, stored in MySQL, which was… at least plaintext in spirit. I had no trouble exporting all the page contents to text files; handling the markup is another story. There are lots of good reasons for wanting plaintext, but eventually I discovered the best one: org-mode. I made plans to translate all the wikitext pages to org, and write or use some sort of static site generator, to mirror a public html blog directly from a local org folder. I did make a few steps in that direction (see also), but never put any effort into a unified solution.

Later, I encountered Hugo, the trendy new static site generator, and it seemed like the obvious answer. The only thing left to do was automate the conversion of org files to html or markdown. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for tinkering with emacs/org/elisp tapered off quickly. I'm happy with emacs as an IDE for code and structured notes, but the idea of using it as a component in generating blog pages was a big turn off.

I started keeping track of some possible solutions - or components of them at least - lots of other nerds are interested in using org for blogs. When I saw an announcement for ox-hugo, I decided it was time to figure this thing out. In the process of setting up a deployment process that would handle the org-html export with ox-hugo, I found this announcement: as of February 2017, Hugo supports org-mode directly!

This makes the workflow ideal:

1. Use org-mode, in emacs, to write post content in files in a local directory.
2. Run a single command to generate updated web content and push to my site.

This post is the proof that it works! Because I am a devopeler extraordinaire, the command is (effectively):

hugo && rsync -rz --update public/* $WEBSITE/blog/.

Of course there is more work to do. I won't be satisfied without syntax highlighting and LaTeX support, but there is lower-hanging fruit I'll tackle first. Finding a theme is probably a good place to start.