Towards minimalism

tldr I moved the blog to an extremely simple static blog generator with no dependencies, no Javascript and no magic tricks. Just plain HTML and CSS. You can find the code here.

If you have been following this blog for some time you will have noticed that I am not very good at keeping a routine of writing new blog posts every week (or even every month). There was something that created a lot of friction in the writing process (even more than the white paper syndrome): every time I wanted to add new content, usually after some months with no content, the blog build process was broken. I spent more time fixing the blog than adding content to it. This made me move to lightweight blogging systems like Jekyll. But it wasn't enough so I decided to embrace minimalism.

What is the very minimal list of features that I need in a blogging framework?:

• Convert from markup languages such as markdown or org-mode into plain html
• Keep an updated index page
• Automatically create a rss.xml file
• Automatically create an archive page and, ideally, another page for each tag

Just that. Those are the only things that I need. And that is what org-static-blog gives me. One single dependency, integrated into Emacs, my OS (well… my code editor). No Javascript, just pure HTML and CSS.