ORG-STATIC-BLOG

Static blog generators are a dime a dozen. This is one more, which focuses on being simple. All files are simple org-mode files in a directory. The only requirement is that every org file must have a #+TITLE and a #+DATE, and optionally, #+FILETAGS, #+DESCRIPTION and #+IMAGE.

#+FILETAGS set the tags for the post, which can be delimited by colons in the form of #+FILETAGS: :foo bar:baz:, or by whitespaces in the form of #+FILETAGS: foo bar. And you can put a short summary in #+DESCRIPTION, which will be converted to a HTML <meta name="description" > tag, it’s good for SEO as described in Wikipedia’s Meta element.

If org-static-blog-enable-og-tags is set to t, #+DESCRIPTION and #+IMAGE (it must be e a relative url) will generate the og:description and og:image meta properties that will be used in URL previews generated in social networks and similar sites (see Open Graph Protocol).

This file is also available from marmalade and melpa-stable.

Set up your blog by customizing org-static-blog’s parameters, then call M-x org-static-blog-publish to render the whole blog or M-x org-static-blog-publish-file filename.org to render only only the file filename.org.

Above all, I tried to make org-static-blog as simple as possible. There are no magic tricks, and all of the source code is meant to be easy to read, understand and modify.

For org-static-blog, a blog consists of six parts:

Blog posts contain individual entries. Every org file in org-static-blog-posts-directory is one blog post. Each blog post is rendered as its own HTML page.
The index page contains the last few blog posts on a single page. The number of entries on the index page can be customized using org-static-blog-index-length.
Optionally show a preview of the post (instead of the full post) on the index page setting org-static-blog-use-preview to t. The region of the post used as a preview is, by default, its first paragraph, but can be fine-tuned using org-static-blog-preview-start and org-static-blog-preview-end.
The archive page lists the publishing dates and headlines of every blog post.
The RSS feed is a machine-readable XML file that contains every blog post. It is not meant to be consumed by humans. Instead RSS readers can use the RSS feed to aggregate entries from multiple blogs.
Drafts are rendered like regular blog posts, but are not included in the index, the archive, or the RSS feed.
Each blog post can be tagged, and each tag links to a page that lists all other posts of the same tag. Additionally, a tag overview page is created that lists the publishing dates and headlines of every blog post, sorted by tags. This feature is only enabled if you set org-static-blog-enable-tags to t.
If org-static-blog-enable-og-tags is set to t, all generated pages will include some useful Open Graph meta properties such as the title, the description and an optional image. If no #+IMAGE property is provided in a post, the default one specified in org-static-blog-image will be used.
To disable comments for single blog posts, reserve a tag name as org-static-blog-no-comments-tag and tag the post with that tag.
It is also possible to create per-tag RSS feeds. This feature is only enabled when you set org-static-blog-enable-tag-rss to t.

Every HTML page in org-static-blog can be customized in the following ways:

The contents of org-static-blog-page-header are inserted into the <head> of every page. Use this to include custom CSS and JavaScript for your blog.
The contents of org-static-blog-page-preamble is inserted just before the content of every page. This is a good place to put the header or menus for your blog.
The contents of org-static-blog-page-postamble is inserted after the content of every generated page: after any blog post page, after the index page, the tag pages and the archive. This is where you can include copyright notices.
The return values of org-static-blog-post-preamble and org-static-blog-post-postamble are prepended and appended to every blog post. If you want to change the formatting of dates, titles, or the tag list, overwrite these functions. In particular the content of org-static-blog-post-comments is inserted at the end of each blog post. Use this to add a comment box.

You can customize the RSS feed output by setting org-static-blog-rss-extra. Its content is placed right before the sequence of posts. For example you can add an RSS icon for the feed, or advertise that you built your blog with org-static-blog. You can also limit the number of entries in the feed via org-static-blog-rss-max-entries.

There are some static texts like ”Other posts”, ”Tags” etc that org-static-blog includes in produced html. By default org-static-blog uses english texts, but language chosen depends on value set to org-static-blog-langcode. If your language is not supported yet, you will see placeholders like [other-posts:de] and [tags:de]. You can add new language by adding texts to org-static-blog-texts list. And if you do, please share and create Pull Request.

If you want to activate a few convenience key bindings, add (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist (cons (concat org-static-blog-posts-directory ".*\\.org\\'") 'org-static-blog-mode)) to your init.el. These key bindings are:

C-c C-f / C-c C-b to open next/previous post.
C-c C-p to open the matching published HTML file of a post.
C-c C-n to create a new blog post.

If you have questions, if you find bugs, or if you would like to contribute something to org-static-blog, please open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

Finally, I would like to remind you that I am developing this project for free, and in my spare time. While I try to be as accommodating as possible, I can not guarantee a timely response to issues. Publishing Open Source Software on GitHub does not imply an obligation to fix your problem right now. Please be civil.

Examples

Minimal Configuration

This minimal configuration should be added to your init.el, and will set up a minimal org-static-blog for the URL https://staticblog.org, which will be saved in the directory ~/projects/blog/.

(setq org-static-blog-publish-title "My Static Org Blog")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-url "https://staticblog.org/")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-directory "~/projects/blog/")
(setq org-static-blog-posts-directory "~/projects/blog/posts/")
(setq org-static-blog-drafts-directory "~/projects/blog/drafts/")
(setq org-static-blog-enable-tags t)
(setq org-export-with-toc nil)
(setq org-export-with-section-numbers nil)

;; This header is inserted into the <head> section of every page:
;;   (you will need to create the style sheet at
;;    ~/projects/blog/static/style.css
;;    and the favicon at
;;    ~/projects/blog/static/favicon.ico)
(setq org-static-blog-page-header
      "<meta name=\"author\" content=\"John Dow\">
<meta name=\"referrer\" content=\"no-referrer\">
<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"initial-scale=1,width=device-width,minimum-scale=1\">
<link href= \"static/style.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />
<link rel=\"icon\" href=\"static/favicon.ico\">")

;; This preamble is inserted at the beginning of the <body> of every page:
;;   This particular HTML creates a <div> with a simple linked headline
(setq org-static-blog-page-preamble
      "<div class=\"header\">
  <a href=\"https://staticblog.org\">My Static Org Blog</a>
</div>")

;; This postamble is inserted at the end of the <body> of every page:
;;   This particular HTML creates a <div> with a link to the archive page
;;   and a licensing stub.
(setq org-static-blog-page-postamble
      "<div id=\"archive\">
  <a href=\"https://staticblog.org/archive.html\">Other posts</a>
</div>
<center><a rel=\"license\" href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\"><img alt=\"Creative Commons License\" style=\"border-width:0\" src=\"https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png\" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dct=\"https://purl.org/dc/terms/\" href=\"https://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text\" property=\"dct:title\" rel=\"dct:type\">bastibe.de</span> by <a xmlns:cc=\"https://creativecommons.org/ns#\" href=\"https://bastibe.de\" property=\"cc:attributionName\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Bastian Bechtold</a> is licensed under a <a rel=\"license\" href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>.</center>")

;; This HTML code is inserted into the index page between the preamble and
;;   the blog posts
(setq org-static-blog-index-front-matter
      "<h1> Welcome to my blog </h1>\n")

In order for this to work, you will also need to create a style sheet at ~/projects/blog/static/style.css, which might for example change the appearance of the #preamble, the #content, and the #postamble.

To write posts, you can now call org-static-blog-create-new-post, and render your blog with org-static-blog-publish.

Each post is an org-mode file such as

#+title: How to Write a Blog Post
#+date: <2020-07-03 08:57>
#+filetags: computers emacs blog

Step one: Install ~org-static-blog~. \\
Step Two: Execute ~M-x org-static-blog-create-new-post~ and write the content. \\
Step Three: Execute ~M-x org-static-blog-publish~ and upload to your webhost. \\
Done.

You can find more complete examples by looking at my init.el and the repository for my blog (bastibe.de) itself to see an example of how to use org-static-blog in practice.

Other org-static-blog blogs:

zngguvnf.org —see the writeup
matthewbauer.us/blog/
jao’s programming musings
f-santos.gitlab.io
xgqt.gitlab.io/blog
unmonoqueteclea
Please open a pull request to add your blog, here!

Features

Hide some subtrees when publishing

Background When publishing some posts, we may not want to publish the more private or unfinished parts of the subtrees. So maybe we can use tags to identify these subtrees and ignore them during the posting process.
Usage
- Set the corresponding tags Set the tag to ignore subtrees with org-static-blog-no-post-tag, default is nonpost.
- Posting The parts containing this tag will be automatically ignored during the posting process.
Example
- If you have an org-mode file containing tree-1, tree-2, tree-3. and only want to publish tree-1 and tree-3, then the file would look like this
```
* tree-1
* tree-2 :nonpost:
* tree-3
    
```
- Then the file will automatically ignore tree-2 subtrees with the nonpost tag when it is published.

Extended cleaning of the suggested filename

If you regularly find yourself editing the suggested filename when creating new posts, e.g. replacing slashes (`/`), then you can modify the value of `org-static-blog-suggested-filename-cleaning-regexp`. With its default value, `”\s”`, it only replaces whitespace.

For example, a post with the title “Using bastibe/org-static-blog for your blog” would, with the default result in a suggested filename of `2023-10-02-using-bastibe/org-static-blog-for-your-blog.org`. If the value of `org-static-blog-suggested-filename-cleaning-regexp` is changed like this

“` (setq org-static-blog-suggested-filename-cleaning-regexp (rx (or “/” (in white))) “`

the `/` will be replaced too and the suggested filename will be `2023-10-02-using-bastibe-org-static-blog-for-your-blog.org`.

Known Issues

Org-static-blog is a pure static site generator. As such, it does not include comments. However, you can easily include services like Disqus to do this for you.
You can have hosting services like GitHub auto-render you blog every time you commit using continuous integration tools like Travis CI. An example of how to do this has been gracefully provided by zngguvnf.
Individual blog entries are only re-rendered if no current HTML file is available (i.e. the org file is older than the HTML file). If you want to forcibly re-render an entry, delete the HTML file.

Changelog

2018-03-17 (v1.0.4): Massive speed up of org-static-blog. A re-render with one changed file used to take about a second per post, and now takes about a second total.
2018-03-21 (v1.1.0): Tags. Each post can now have tags (using #+tags:). If you enable org-static-blog-enable-tags, tags are included in each post, tag-index pages are generated for each tag, and a tag archive is generated for all tags.
2018-03-23 (v1.1.1): Tags. Deprecated #+tags: in favor of #+filetags:, which is the correct way of setting file-wide tags in org-mode. (Thank you, Kaushal Modi!)
2018-04-19 (v1.2.0): HTML5 Org-static-blog now outputs valid HTML5 instead of XHTML. This makes the resulting HTML cleaner, but shouldn’t impact your styles. Also, you can now customize your content language by setting org-static-blog-langcode and the HTML output has been fixed in a few places. (Thank you, Michael Cardell Widerkrantz!)
2020-03-20 (v1.3.0): Nested directories, Translations, and more Improve handling of local variables (Thank you, Matthew Bauer) Rewrote README in org-mode (Thank you, Rafał -rsm- Marek) Adds support for localizations (Thank you, Rafał -rsm- Marek) Put license in a LICENSE file (Thank you, Jonas Bernoulli) Adds uption to force-rerender entire blog (Thank you, Winny) Support for non-flat directory structure (Thank you, Shmavon Gazanchyan) Support for “preview” slugs on index page (Thank you, K. Scarlet) Various bugfixes (Thank you, Matthew Bauer, luhuaei, neeasade, Yauhen Makei, Winny, zsxh) Translations in RU, BY, FR (Thank you, Yauhen Makei, Théo Jacquin)
2020-07-20 (v1.4.0): Adds a command to create drafts (Thank you, Massimo Lauria) Adds optional RSS info (Thank you, Massimo Lauria) Restructures preamble and postamble to be more consistent (Thank you, Massimo Lauria) Translations in IT, ES (Thank you, Massimo Lauria, Alberto Álvarez) Option to make ellipsis link to full post (Thank you, jaor) Improves preview generation (Thank you, Allo) Render RSS dates as per RFT-822 and the RSS spec
2021-03-05 (v1.5.0) Better awareness for posts in subdirectories (Thank you, Justin Abrahms) New custom variable org-static-blog-rss-max-entries (Thank you, jao) Can now exclude some posts from RSS feeds (Thank you, jao) New custom variable for index page header (Thank you, Bruno Deremble)
2022-05-05 (v1.6.0) Adds #+description support that fills the description meta tag (Thank you, Guangwang Huang) Adds optional post slugs, and date before title (Thank you, jao) Correct date encoding in RSS and various RSS fixes (Thank you, Agnessa Bubowska) Ability to not publish subtrees by tag (Thank you, wangz) Fixes some warnings related to Emacs 28 (Thank you, Maciej Barć)
next Fixes path related issues for drafts Optionally disables comments if a customizable tag is set

LICENSE

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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Minimal Configuration

Other org-static-blog blogs:

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Hide some subtrees when publishing

Extended cleaning of the suggested filename

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