Blogging with Emacs and org-mode

Setting up blogging with Emacs is tricky compared to some other solutions, like metalsmith in my case. I wanted to have a simple solution from writing to publishing. With metalsmith I write the blog in org format, export it to markdown then publish with npm. It is not too bad, and I figured out some things as I was converting that workflow from Javascript. It is likely not worth the effort, I spent way too much time on it. But now I can write something quickly and export directly to html with a few key presses.

Here are some of the tradeoffs that I ran into:

• Less control of the output, it can be tricky to format or which method you should use. You can write html for export, and include other .org files directly for example.
• Text in preamble/postamble will be replaced, ie %d etc. Be careful.
• Your entries might be cached, so you forcefully have to delete the cache when you edit a post and if you want to republish it.
• Installing latest versions of org-mode and org-contrib with quelpa requires custom configuration for Emacs to find the elisp files.