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.
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-directoryis 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 one paragraph instead of full post on index
org-static-blog-use-preview. - 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-tagstot.
Every HTML page in org-static-blog can be customized in the following ways:
- The contents of
org-static-blog-page-headerare 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-preambleis 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-postambleis 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-preambleandorg-static-blog-post-postambleare 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 oforg-static-blog-post-commentsis 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.
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-bto open next/previous post.C-c C-pto open the matching published HTML file of a post.C-c C-nto 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.
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\">
<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>")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:
- cat-v.mit.edu
- zngguvnf.org
- matthewbauer.us/blog/
- lisper.pl
- jao’s programming musings
- whatacold.github.io
- Hard Theorems
- f-santos.gitlab.io
- Life & Computing Science
- Clickable headlines, banner, floating toc, Disqus comments, styling, …, see the writeup
- Please open a pull request to add your blog, here!
- 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.
- 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 enableorg-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-langcodeand 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
Copyright 2015, Bastian Bechtold
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.