Wherein org-mode was a pain

I've added RSS and Atom feeds to this text blog and it's probably the best way to consume it. But more importantly, I stopped using org-mode to try and publish the site because, honestly, it kind of sucks.

I write all these entries in org-mode because I generally like Emacs for writing. I used to publish the site using the publishing capabilities of org-mode. The configuration was a bit of a beast, but it worked. To do stuff like generate feeds and other small stuff, though, was a massive pain. Extending org-mode is possible, but it kind of sucks. The API for parsing and handling Org files is not very nice and everything feels like a hack. I also hit some backwards compatibility issues at times.

All that was a lot of friction for publishing, so I kind of just left it. Now I've gotten away from it. I'm still writing entries as Org files, but the publishing is now a bunch of Makefiles and some XSLT so I can actually transform some things properly. (For example, fixing relative links in the feeds and omitting stuff like the footnotes was a massive pain in the ass in Emacs.)

I love Emacs, but doing everything in it is the wrong move. Doing it with this site was proof of that for me.