My new setup for publishing posts

I use Hugo for this website. Recently, I rediscovered OrgMode and I decided to give it a go as my note taking mechanism. Consequently, it only made sense to also translate posts on this website into this new setup. This post highlights the setup and the new process.

The Previous Setup

But first, let’s look at the previous setup! The previous setup was the plain vanilla Hugo setup. All my posts were inside a content/ folder. They were written in Markdown. Things were fine really!

I didn’t really have a problem with the setup. The only friction was having to switch between OrgMode and Markdown depending on the context. Anyone trying to learn a new language understands that to achieve native fluency in the new language requires you to start “thinking” in the new language, embrace its idioms – idiosyncracies and all!

Lucky strike

Fortunately for me, OrgMode already supports exporting to Markdown!! This made the transition so much easier… In my head, the New Way Of Doing Things looked like this:

1. Start a post in content-org/ folder. Write it in OrgMode.
2. Export the post to Markdown. The exported file would live in the content/ folder.
3. Win!

Setup

The first attempt at a plain Markdown worked! A minor inconvenience was that I needed to manually specify the output file. Again, fortunately for me, some awesome folks have already improved on this pain point and made it seamless (:chef’s kiss:)!! Yet another moment I’m grateful that Open Source Software exists and is thriving!

For me (using Doom Emacs), this was as simple as adding the following line to my init.el file.

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;; under the :lang section find the line saying org and change it to:
(org +hugo)

With this in place, all I needed to add to the top of my post.org file was:

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#+HUGO_BASE_DIR: ../
#+HUGO_SECTION: posts

This would automatically export my Markdown posts to the content/posts/ folder. Additional configuration for ox-hugo (the OrgMode plugin that makes this possible) can be found on the plugin’s website.

One final addition to make the whole experience seamless was to enable auto-export on save. To do this, I needed to create a .dir-locals.el file at the root of my Hugo website and add the following content to it:

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(("content-org/"
  . ((org-mode . ((eval . (org-hugo-auto-export-mode))
                  (setq 'ox-hugo-export-with-section-numbers t))))))

Conclusion

While it may seem a lot of effort and yak-shaving to reduce a minor friction point, I want to use OrgMode as my lingua franca so I believe it is worth the effort.