I’ve moved to a slightly different set-up for publishing this site, as well as a new theme.

Since I now do almost all my writing using Emacs org mode it makes sense to use it for online writing too. I was worried that this change would erase all the blog-writing I’ve done already: even though it’s out of date and often of questionable correctness (with hindsight), I still didn’t want to lose all 400-odd posts – and definitely didn’t want to have to reformat them all.

Fortunately the Nikola site builder I’ve been using comes with a plug-in to publish org mode pages alongside all the other formats Nikola handles (plain text, markdown, reStructured text, Jupyter, …). So while new content will be written in org, all the old stuff remains largely untouched. That’s a great demonstration of the advantages of modular software and text files for content!

At the same time I wanted to change the theme and the structure of pages, which I’ve done by writing a variant of the gruberwine theme with different fonts and navigation icons. (I also added my own social-sharing bar to posts, which I should really turn into a plug-in.) A lot of my recent writing has actually been book reviews from Goodreads, and I re-templated those and added some tidied-up date processing. I also modified the continuous import plug-in to tag and categorise the created files better: that will get fed back to the main plug-ins repository as a pull request at some point.

There are still a few funnies, and also more to say about the use of org in this context, which I’ll be writing about in the future.