Updated Website

I decide to move away from building my website using Hugo and instead use the power of Emacs (specifically Org publish) to streamline and simplify the web development process.

In an attempt to simplify my life I found that the former website had too many dependencies on my system for my liking; such as Hugo (fair-enough I suppose), the Go programming language required to use Hugo (I never use Go for anything but Hugo), and Bulma for CSS. Moreover, there is of course the use of Go templates in HTML as yet another layer of abstraction. To be fair, I have used Jinja in the past so it wasn't hard to pick Hugo's template engine, but still…all this just for a simple static website?

I wanted to use Org-mode for writing (it's awesome), therefore I spent the time investigating how to use Org-publish and if it will work for my requirements, spoiler alert: it did.

Now that my Emacs-fu has improved and I am quite comfortable writing Emacs Lisp code, I rebuilt the site from scratch utilising Org-mode, some HTML snippets, and CSS. Also, I now get to use nice features such as custom Org links via the org-link-set-parameters function; which I configured to add a completing-read interface when inserting images or post links, as well as file-name error checking which is presented via font-face attributes.

Furthermore, I have also removed Utterances as the primary comment system of the website. Why? Because Github now has a Discussions API which is far better suited for comments than Utterances' use Github Issues (still nothing wrong with Utterances if you want to use it). There is also now the Giscus app, which uses the discussion API and seems to be just as good for comments.

However, going back to the premise of rebuilding the site (which is to keep the dependencies at a minimum and to keep the site simple) I have opted to use a comment via email button below each post. This will also prevent JavaScript code injection from external apps or APIs, resulting in an improved page performance, website integrity and a reduction of dependencies.

In conclusion, I am quite happy with the results that Emacs and Org-mode has provided, and recommend them as a build option to any tinkerers out there!