Echo Area

I have a big problem: I can't write a blog in anything other than Org mode. I have another problem: I haven't found a good way to write a blog only in Org mode. This always keeps me going back and forth between blogging systems. I've used tekuti, WordPress, and I've tried a few others. Currently I'm using Coleslaw. I haven't written anything lately though because it supports Markdown and HTML and I was getting antsy for some Org mode again. So I've been on the lookout for something new.

Well… I've had enough. I'm not going away this time. I'm going to fix my problems and commit to this system. I picked Coleslaw because it's written en Common Lisp and has some interesting features. I'm going to write an exporter for org to whatever Coleslaw needs!

I've known that it's pretty easy to write an exporter for Org mode for some time, but I've never actually tried to write one. I modified some bits and bobs on org-blog, but that didn't really work out. Today though, while reading an old(er) post on Endless Parentheses, I ran into ox-jekyll. Jekyll has a pretty similar page/post definition syntax to Coleslaw, so it seemed easy to read what they're doing and copy the relevant parts. It's a very small Emacs Lisp file, which made it very easy. So congrats to them and the people writing Org mode for making some very clear code.

So I wrote (or copied) ox-coleslaw based on ox-jekyll. It's slightly smaller than ox-jekyll because, frankly, it offers less. I just need a simple way to export a .org file to a .post file, nothing fancy.

To write posts I will use Org mode. Once ox-coleslaw is loaded I use the org export function to export it to an HTML file with the proper header. You can also do this non-interactively from, for example, a Makefile, but that is a story for another time.

This document is the first attempt at publishing a blog post using ox-coleslaw.