Hello World!

My first post at my new home. Obviously, it was going to be about the move. You knew it, didn’t you? ;)

Well, I got some space on the web, along with a few friends. Thanks to my org-mode fanboyism, I now use it to maintain my homepage. I’ve successfully completed import of my Wordpress posts and comments. :)

I now use

Yes, I know it sounds rather complicated. :) But, now that I have it set up, it’s not all that difficult to make a post. It’s just a matter of one git commit and push. I need to fine-tune the shell script a bit, though.

How I moved

The move definitely wasn’t trivial. I guess, I could’ve started afresh but, what fun would that have been? ;)

This roughly how I did things – in the order that I did them.

Choosing hyde

I looked at a handful of options to maintain a blog, using org-mode — blorg, org-jekyll, blorgit, ikiwiki. After some assessment, I decided upon org-jekyll and jekyll. But then, I accidentally stumbled upon hyde.

I decided to go with hyde instead of jekyll 6 since

  1. It’s in Python. I didn’t want to start figuring out Ruby, now.
  2. It uses Django templates 7. And Django is something, I wish to learn. I’ve started with that. :)

Clean up org-jekyll to work with hyde.

I then “ported” org-jekyll.el into org-hyde.el.

Clean up older org2blog posts

org2blog can post either buffers or subtrees. I had posts in both formats. I converted all of them into subtrees of one tree, using some Python.

Import older posts

This was the most painful posts. Importing all the old posts from Wordpress. org-mode really needs a XHTML/XML importer!

I did all sorts of crazy stuff to get this done.

A workflow for publishing

Set up git along with some bash code, to have a mechanism to minimize the effort in making a blog post. All this is still a lot of work, compared to the ease with which I used to use org2blog. That’s partly due to ssh restrictions in my hostel.

CSS clean-up

I’m using the same CSS for org-mode published files and hyde published files. I had to clean up my hyde templates and the CSS to make both of them look similar.

My first tryst with CSS hasn’t been all that bad. :)

Installing disqus and importing comments

Using disqus was one thing, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I would’ve loved it if comments could be managed with org-mode too. ;) 8

Anyway, I finally decided to go with it, and I’m quite happy with it. :)

I loved the ease with which comments could be imported.

  1. Import Wordpress comments using the export xml file.
  2. Generate a CSV file containing the URL map – mapping the newer urls to the older ones.
  3. Upload the CSV file and tada!

Conclusion

I got to learn quite a few things, during all of this. I also have some bits of code, that I can share with you, in case you are interested. Leave a comment, if you wish. :)

I’m just hoping to reduce the additional steps required in publishing to ensure it doesn’t add to my already erratic blogging habits.


  1. Org-mode - Homepage ↩︎

  2. Org-hyde is a port of org-jekyll.el ↩︎

  3. Hyde - Github ↩︎

  4. Git - Homepage ↩︎

  5. Disqus - Homepage ↩︎

  6. Github - Jekyll ↩︎

  7. Documentation - Django Templates ↩︎

  8. I feel it is capable of doing that. It’s just my incapability that prevented me from trying it out. ↩︎