Blogging with Emacs and Org Mode

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +1000

<2026-09-07 Mon>

Welcome to my first post!

Over the years I've had several websites, but I failed to maintain them after an initial burst of interest and they eventually faded into obscurity. This is my latest attempt and, although it took a very long time (I started in 2024), I have finally got it to a point that I am happy. There are a number of key features that make it easy to maintain so I can hopefully post more regularly. Throughout this post I will answer questions such as why I have a website, for whom I am writing, what I am writing, and some of the technical details. My blog post writing skills are a little rusty, so bear with me.

1. Why do you have a website?

There are a number of reasons why a person may want a website. In the online spaces I engage with, websites are fairly standard and often take the place of platforms such as LinkedIn. This is atypical for younger or less tech literate people for whom creating a website may seem difficult or a waste of time. As someone who is interested in Free Software and Digital Sovereignty, creating a website and a blog is a no-brainer; it presents an opportunity for expression which is not dependent on large tech companies.

Also, it's just cool to have your own website.

2. Who is it for?

Me.

I don't really expect anyone to be reading (if you are, thanks!) The blog is just for me to collect information and document interests in a way that feels more meaningful than a file on my computer. If others benefit, that's great to.

3. What will I write?

My interests have varied greatly throughout my life, but this website is likely to focus on technology, physics, and education. Currently, I have a single, all-encompassing, blog but in the future I may separate it into smaller blogs with their own RSS feeds. I am considering writing reviews for music, movies, and art I enjoy.

I like scientific writing, but I don't think I will publish much here; maybe the occasional essay?

4. How does it work?

The short of it is, using Emacs and Org Mode. I write an org file and this is exported into HTML using a script I wrote (leveraging existing Emacs functions). I may add some more details here at another time but for now I leave the following resources that I found useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfkrzFodoNw

https://zwpdbh.github.io/emacs/org-to-blog-using-org-publish.html

https://gitlab.com/psachin/psachin.gitlab.io

https://orgmode.org/guide/Publishing.html

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-blog-wiki.html

https://taingram.org/blog/org-mode-blog.html

https://git.sr.ht/~taingram/org-publish-rss/

https://alhassy.com/

5. TODO

While the general function is pretty good, I still want to make some changes to the CSS to improve the look. Also, as I mentioned, I think I will add additional blogs for specific topics similar to Protesilaos' blog. To do this I will need to modify org-publish-rss.el to somehow compile multiple RSS feeds.

It is a great shame that this site is hosted on Github. I will, when time permits, move this site to my own VPS in an attempt to further free myself of Mircosoft.