Rebuilding in Org Mode

Over a year ago I started to completely rebuild this website, but since then have done nothing with it. I have not been completely negligent in website maintenacne and update. I have made several updates and posts to my more general philosphical focused website, PraEx, but nothing on this one despite many ideas and visions for this website. There have been many things that have gotten in the way of those updates, but one in particular has been tool that I have been using for websites. For the past several years, I have primarily built websites using the Hugo static site generator. Hugo is a great tool for building static websites and I would strongly recommend anyone wanting a website builder to consider using Hugo. But it is not working well for me and my particular way of managing projects. Some reasons include:

• It has way more capability than I need. I would argue that most organizations should consider building their website using a static site generator and with all the features, capabilties and speed of a tool like Hugo, there is little one cannot do while signficantly reducing webserve complexity. But for my use case, I am now starting to think that it is more than I need.
• It is written in Go. I have nothing against Go, but I do not use Go for anything else and have never really attempted to learn the language. Most of my programming efforts these days are in C, Rust, Javascript, and Lisp/Scheme. I really do not need to add a fifth language to my active skillset that I am only using for websites. Though you can definetely use Hugo without needing to learn Go, as a programmer I keep wanting to tinker with it and keep running into problems that many times are caused by my lack of fully understanding the Go language.
• Its pace of development is too rapid. I do not have time to be a full-time web developer for my personnel projects. It feels like if I skip looking at the Hugo website for more than a month I will miss some new capability or a breaking change to a feature I am using. It is great that development of Hugo is that active, but I do not have time to keep up with it. I am sure this is somewhat of an exageration, but that is what if feels like to me. If I have skipped working on my websites for a couple months, I start hesitating about diving back in for fear that I will need to spend an hour or two reviewing all the updates to Hugo since the last time refreshed my Hugo skill set.

My next attempt at maintaining and posting to this website is going to be using the built-in capabilities of Org Mode. This is not the first time I have attempted to do so, but I feel I did not really understand Emacs and Org Mode during those previous efforts. I kept trying to make them into something they are not rather using them as they are. Some reasons for doing so:

• It takes full advantage of the tools I am already using. For the last three years I have been using Emacs and Org Mode for all of my writing and programming projects. No need to refresh my memory on some CommonMark syntax when I am attempting to publish a post; I just keep using my evolving capabilities with Emacs and Org Mode.
• I expect it will be a more simple and straightforward approach to website building. It is perhaps a little more hands-on maintenance, but I have been building websites writing raw HTML since the mid 1990s. Using tools that try to hide the under-lying code too much are difficult for me to use. When I have an idea for something, I usually have an idea of what that would look like in HTML, but then I spend too much time trying to figure how to use the tool to get there. Rather than just coding it in HTML directly. Maybe Org Mode will also get in my way too much, but that is part of the experiment!
• It is a stable platform. As I continue to develop my skills with Org Mode I can expect them to be useful for many years to come. Steve Losh in discussing learning Common Lisp makes a great case for using tools with decades of stability. I wonder where I would be if I just stuck with using Org Mode for my websites for the last 10+ years.

My current thought is to gradually rebuild this in Org Mode and to document my progress. We will see if this makes it to a Post 3 and Post 4 and etc.