001 - Site Overhaul - 2025/06/27

Over the last few days, I have been completely overhauling this site. This is motivated by the fact that I have had two versions of what my personal website could be kicking around on my computer for more than a year now. The first is a single page that basically acts as a prose extension of my resume. It has been hosted at the github free hosting for my github account. The second is a more involved site that would encourage me to extend and improve it over time. The idea was that it would contain all the content that the static github version has, but would make it easier to extend. Also it likely wouldn't be hosted on github.

Site Creation

The initial version of the github site was created using Emacs's Org mode and the exporting and publishing features to programatically compile a set of org files and static data like images and PDFs into nice HTML, handling all the links and connections smoothly.

For this refactored version, I've continued to use org as the proverbial framework, since it is naturally integrated with emacs and is a sensible middle ground between a full framework for complicated site features and writing HTML by hand. I've also eschewed the use of various external packages and extensions to org modes publishing options out of both ideology and the fact that I really don't see any reason why my site should be more complicated than just a few pages linked together. Keeping to just the features included in the standard org publishing suite also allows the environment for updating my website to exist entirely within the confines of emacs and thus be (generally) portable.

Hosting

The previous version of my site was hosted on github, as previously mentioned. However in recent times I have made some strides in improving the up-time and reachability of the headless server I run personally. While it's hardly reliable (mostly due to my ISP's frequent downtime and constant shuffling of IP addresses), I would like to generally move away from github and freemium style services in the direction of either simple services I am willing to pay for (i.e. Mullvad) or self hosting. Additionally, for my own projects I have no need for the automated tooling and other features github provides. Finally, it would be nice to actually have something interesting at the domain I control.

Expression

Part of this site revamp idea was that I would also include a blog as part of it, as it would add some texture to my somewhat faceless resume / professional image, and I'd like to think at least some of my ideas are interesting. The credit for the final push goes to my friend Elle (a participant in this webring hopefully), who had made some similar additions to her own site and encouraged me to do the same.

However producing a blog page that was formatted in the way I was hoping for (i.e. indexible posts that support the full strength of the org->HTML exporter that display in the same page) was less than smooth. The most basic idea would be to simply write out the blog posts as headers in a single long org file. This is naturally unwieldy, so I wanted to have some system that would allow me to write each post in a separate file and then have them collated at export.

At first blush this seemed easy enough. Org mode features an include macro that would splice in the contents of another file at export time, and a macro system that would hopefully allow one to expand to the full set of files to be included. However this was not quite enough, since both the macro and the include would be expanded a single time during the initial pass over the org file, and thus if the macro expanded to an include, the include would be treated as an org comment rather than a directive and thus would have no effect on the exported output.

The solution was easy enough however, I simply had to make the macro call out to standard elisp and then do the more complicated work there, where I had a more flexible, familiar, and composable semantics. The final version of the solution was quite compact:

(defun my/find-org-files-in-dir (dir)
       (with-temp-buffer
                (call-process "find" nil (current-buffer) nil
                              dir "-type" "f" "-name" "*.org")
                (sort-lines nil (point-min) (point-max))
                (let* ((s (buffer-string))
                       (ls (s-lines s))
                       (fls (-filter (lambda (l) (not (string-empty-p l))) ls)))
                  fls)))

(defun my/concat-file-contents (files)
       (with-temp-buffer
                (mapc 'insert-file-contents files)
                (buffer-string)))

And invoke it like so:

#+macro: splice-dir (eval (my/concat-file-contents (my/find-org-files-in-dir $1)))
{{{splice-dir(/home/tmu/Desktop/site/org/blog/)}}}

All in all, hardly the most exciting hack but in the immortal words of XKCD 196, Linux (read Emacs) gives you the tools to deal with your problems. The only question that remains is when you begin to get a taste for solving your own problems and the journey with your computer from non-functional to semi-functional becomes its own reward, can you really say that your situation is better than the non-technical people who don't think about their tools at all? I certainly know how I feel about it, but from the outside looking in one can only imagine I appear quite the fool. How could he know so much and have so many problems? All I can do is assure them that it's an acquired taste.