Blogging With Jekyll, Hexo, Emacs and Org

Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore!

This is really just a moan, move on - there are almost certainly better things to do with your life.

Still here? Ok, you have been warned.

Blogging, blogging, blogging

I rate emacs, it really can seem to do anything, as long as you are happy to build your own editor on top of it.

I also rate org-mode, which can also seem to do anything, and markdown which is a much saner way to create content that end up in HTMLs. And of course org-mode can publish docs.

A also decided that I didn’t want to hand over my content, so a system which generates a website I can upload to my server is another requirement.

A quick google and jekyll seems to be the number one contender, it supports markdown, is a static site generator and everybody seems to rave about it.

Jekyll

Getting started with Jekyll is trivially easy, particularly on a Mac where ruby is installed out of the box. From their start page:

$ gem install jekyll
$ jekyll new my-awesome-site
$ cd my-awesome-site
$ /my-awesome-site $ jekyll serve
;; => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

And it really that easy. In fact, this blog (as of now) is using the default theme - not bad is it? Blog posts require a trivial amount of meta-data and it is even natively understood (indeed, even underpins) github pages.

Jekyll and not Hyde

So where is the pain?

Well, turns out that when hosted on github pages you can’t use plugins. Ok, fine, except some pretty fundamental capabilities aren’t supported out of the box:

  • tagging
  • tag clouds
  • tag feeds
  • archived pages
  • search

and so on.

Jekyll does support plugins but they aren’t enabled when using github pages. There are some pretty neat people out there who have achieved some of the above capabilities using liquid which jekyll uses for templating, for example here are some.

The problem is I can’t seem to get them to work. I also can’t seem to get any of the plugin based ones to work either.

Is it me? Probably :-), and I confess I haven’t spent more than a couple of hours on it, but why on earth isn’t something as fundamental as this supported out of the box?

Emacs to the rescue

Moving on, at least I can look forward to using emacs and org-mode to integrate with jekyll. Look, there are even official instructions. Except that assumes you have already configured the beast that is org-mode publishing.

Surely there must be an easier HOWTO? Well there seems to be lots only none of those seem to work either!

Again, is it me? Again, I only spent a few hours on this, but compared to the 5 minutes I spent bootstrapping jekyll and creating my first blog post, I am shocked that this stuff is so hard.

Giving up?

At this point I was thinking that maybe I am not the candidate audience as I simply want a blog to work, I don’t particularly care how, only that is markdown based and is statically generated. A quick bit of research showed there are plenty in this space and a bit more research showed https://www.staticgen.com.

The top 4 at the time I looked were:

Well, I didn’t want to depend on GitHub and Octopress is based on jekyll. Off to Hexo.

Hexo

Hexo is about as simple as jekyll to get started, and out of the box it supports all the various gadgetry that I want.

Posts are written in markdown with a little big of ceremony at the top, similar to jekyll.

But looking into a little bit more, things just didn’t sit well. Nothing specific, but it didn’t vibe with me as much as jekyll.

So where are we?

So, I am going to stick with jekyll and accept I might need to put some more time in than expected. Fine, and it is definitely a nice problem to have compared to the horrors of hosted blogging platforms (which shall remain nameless).

Emacs? Yeah, I am typing this in org mode and will manually export it to markdown and then copy and paste.

Yeah, I know.

Anyway, that is the end of my moan. Thanks for reading and hopefully the rest of the posts on this blog will be a bit more educational and upbeat, but please do be prepared for this blog to grow organically as I get used to jekyll ;-).

Bye all.

emacsjekyllorg-modeblog