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This week, I re-implemented my main website. The text on the old one needed to be revised heavily (in fact I removed almost all of it except a short bio and some longer articles) and I wanted to experiment with a more colorful look. I need to revise the stylesheet a bit more to give a better experience on small screens (mobile), but so far I’m pleased with the result.

The new site html is generated completely by emacs’ org-mode project publishing functionality (the old one used a custom bunch of perl scripts generating from HTML snippets and perl POD documents). This hopefully means it’ll be easier to add and revise content, and it also provides nice syntax highlighting for any code snippets I put in my articles.

The whole switchover was pretty smooth, especially once I wrote a bit of elisp to roughly prepare conversion from POD formatting to org:


(defun pod2org
(point mark)
"Rougly convert region from pod syntax to org-mode"
(interactive "r")
(replace-regexp "C]+\\)>" "=\\1=" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "I]+\\)>" "/\\1/" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "B]+\\)>" "*\\1*" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "^=head1 \\(.*\\)" "* \\1" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "^=head2 \\(.*\\)" "** \\1" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "^=head3 \\(.*\\)" "*** \\1" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "^=head4 \\(.*\\)" "**** \\1" nil point mark)
(replace-regexp "^=head5 \\(.*\\)" "***** \\1" nil point mark))

Very basic, but pretty useful.

Now, I’m considering replacing WordPress for this blog with org-mode too. That probably requires a bit more investigation. I want to keep at least the tags/categories feature and related rss feeds, and I’m not sure if that’s available for org at the moment.