Or is it like v5 at this point?

In the lead up to JuliaCon 2023 I was throwing together the final touches on my presentations and talking to Teco a lot about his presentation and started digging into the org file he used to create it. I had followed his beamer recommendations in the past, I just had never seen behind the curtain of how he does it.

Then it hit me. Why did I never try just using org export for my personal site? I continually searched for ways to write my posts in org-mode, but I always wanted to use the newest and fanciest web framework. Why? I’m not a web developer. I know enough to be dangerous, but the things I was trying to do were vastly over complicated for a personal site. It’s some static text, and some links. It was never going to need all of the functionality of astro. I mainly wanted to use astro because it would just ship html by default and be fast.

Spoiler alert, org-mode does that out of the box.

Scoping what I actually needed

1. I love automated publishing. I literally don’t think I could run a website or software project without it. The thought of manually walking through the build process manually is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I should just push it to a repo, and boom results. Manual steps are prone to me getting bored halfway through and never finishing it.
2. I hate checking generated files into repos. That means html files, coverted markdown files from org-export. It just clutters the commits and you can’t follow the history.

So from that I planned on:

1. Start with plain html export
2. Get all of the content in the right places
3. Throw some css on there.
4. Then answer the age old question, do you really need JavaScript?¹

Footnotes

1. I noticed NvChad used UnoCSS and Solid.js, which seem minimal, while I was looking for a Doom Emacs like Neovim experience. Planning on using those first. ↩