Every time I look at someone’s simple static site generation setup for their blog, I feel a pang of envy. I’m sure I could make a decent blogging engine in 2,000 lines of code, and it would be something I’d understand, be proud over, able to extend, and willing to share with others.

Instead, I write these articles in Org mode, and use mostly the standard Org publishing functions to export them to html. This is sometimes brittle, but most annoyingly, I don’t understand it. I have been asked for details on how my publishing flow works, but the truth is I have no idea what happens when I run the org-publish-current-file command.

I could find out by tracing the evaluation of the Lisp code that runs on export, but I won’t, because just the html exporting code (ox-html.el) is 5,000 lines of complexity. The general exporting framework (ox-publish.el and ox.el) is 8,000 lines. The framework depends on Org parsing code (org-element.el) which is at least another 9,000 lines. This is over 20,000 lines of complexity I’d need to contend with.

It might seem like a no-brainer to just write that 2,000 line custom static generator and use that instead.

Except one thing: Babel.

Any lightweight markup format (like Markdown or ReStructuredText or whatever) allows for embedding code blocks, but Org, through Babel, can run that code on export, and then display the output in the published document, even when the output is a table or an image. It supports sessions that lets code reuse definitions from earlier code blocks. It allows for injecting variables from the markup into the code, and vice versa. As a bonus, Org doesn’t require a JavaScript syntax highlighter, because it generates inline styles in the source code.

It does this for a large number of languages, although I mainly use it with R for drawing plots. Being able to do this is incredibly convenient, because it makes it trivial to draft data, illustrations, and text at the same time, adjusting both until the article coheres. Having tried it, I cannot see myself living without it.

A simple 2,000 line blogging engine would be a fun weekend project. Mirroring the features of Babel I use would turn it into a multi-month endeavour for someone with limited time such as myself. Not going to happen, and I will continue to beat myself up for overcomplicating my publishing workflow.