Switching from Middleman to EGO for static-site generation
Published on (2016-11-26 Fri) by Levi Strope.

Motivation

I want a simple way to produce blog content

I have used middleman (ruby) and cryogen (clojure), but they require a lot of configuration. At the end of the day I just want to create content.

The endless configuration options is just slowing me down so I needed to change how I published my site and its content.

I found a number of org-mode blog solutions

Historically there has been a couple of well-documented solutions for blogging with org-mode but I always found them lacking. Many are included at Org-blog-wiki.

There are three that stand out:

o-blog: The link of o-blog pointed to the v1 version, but the v2 version did not seem much better.
org-page: allows me to generate a site from my org notes!
nikola: Nikola is awesome but it is a third-party dependency. I needed simpler.

I gravitated towards the simplicity of org-page because all I need is emacs and I wanted to use org-mode for content. Unfortunately org-page is lacking in some explanation of options so I began searching.

https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page/blob/master/doc/quick-guide.org: This was crucial to configuring org-page.
http://kuangdash.github.io/blog/2015/04/15/org-page%E7%9A%84%E9%85%8D%E7%BD%AE%E4%B8%8E%E4%BD%BF%E7%94%A8/: More configuration notes for org-page. Needs translation.
http://tumashu.github.io/org-webpage/: org-webpage looks slightly more robust, uses org-page underneath.
http://emacs-china.github.io/EGO/: EGO incorporates org-webpage and org-page, and it has decent documentation!

Execution: `M-x package-install ego`

Choosing EGO I whipped together the requisite emacs configuration:

(require 'ego)
(ego-add-to-alist 'ego-project-config-alist
                  `(("localredhead"
                     :repository-directory "~/Projects/localredhead.github.io"
                     :repository-org-branch "source" ;
                     :repository-html-branch "master" ;
                     :site-domain "https://levistrope.com"
                     :site-main-title "Levi Strope"
                     :site-sub-title "entropy in action"
                     :theme (mashmellow)
                     :default-category "blog"
                     :summary (("year" :year :updates 10))
                     :source-browse-url ("Github" "https://github.com/localredhead")
                     :personal-avatar "https://media.licdn.com/media/p/6/005/
095/364/3fd9ba3.jpg"
                     :confound-email t
                     :ignore-file-name-regexp "readme.org"
                     :category-ignore-list ("themes" "assets" "notes"))))

EGO considers each directory in your root to be a category so whitelist any folders you want to ignore for publishing. EGO looks for themes in the local root first so I placed my theme mashmellow in the themes folder.

Once I had the documents ready, previewing and deploying was a breeze via

M-x ego-test-current-page
M-x ego-do-publication

Example index page:

#+TITLE:
#+AUTHOR:      Levi Strope
#+EMAIL:       levi.strope@gmail.com
#+URI:         /
#+DESCRIPTION: Personal website of Levi Strope
#+LANGUAGE:    en
#+OPTIONS:     H:3 num:nil toc:t \n:nil ::t |:t ^:nil -:nil f:t *:t <:t

Hello!

I live, work, and sometimes sleep in San Franscisco :)

This web space will be dedicated to my geekery and anything that interests

The about page is about as sparse. I finally started to learn org-mode and the byproduct was this post, and site :)