YAGNI

Emacs offers the possibility to export org files into different formats. This task can be done either by a single file or by project organized in a folder tree.

This post explains how to setup a project called "posts" that will export org files into HTML and prepare them for publishing on the web. I use a similar setup to maintain a personal blog without the need of a framework other than Emacs itself.

A static web site normally consists of text files that provide the structure and look (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) and additional content files such as images, videos, etc. The structure of a project (named "posts" in this example) may look like this:

posts
    |-- 1.org
    |-- 2.org
    |-- css/
    |   `-- my.css
    |-- img/
    |   |-- emacs.png
    |   `-- org-mode.png
    |-- index.org
    `-- js/
        `-- my.js

In this structure, the org files are blog entries that will be exported to HTML, the rest of the files will be kept unmodified and published as attachments.

Org-mode offers the org-publish-project-alist variable which holds a list of projects and components that will be exported and published. In this example, the "posts" project can be split in two different components:

1. posts-to-html: for the org files that are to be exported to HTML and published
2. posts-attachments: for the files that are to be published unmodified

Given this, the org-publish-project-alist will can be declared as:

(setq org-publish-project-alist
    `(("posts-to-html"
       :base-directory "~/path/to/posts"
       :base-extension "org"
       :publishing-directory "/ssh:user@host:/var/www/posts"
       :recursive  t
       :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
       :headline-levels 4
       :auto-preamble  t)
      ("posts-attachments"
       :base-directory "~/path/to/posts"
       :base-extension "css\\|jpg\\|png\\|js"
       :publishing-directory "/ssh:user@host:/var/www/posts"
       :recursive t
       :publishing-function org-publish-attachment)
      ("posts" :components ("posts-to-html" "posts-attachments"))))

The last item on the list (posts), represents the project and lists its two components.

With this definition now it's possible to export and publish the "posts" site using org-export-dispatch bound to C-c C-e P x posts.

1. Org-mode manual