Create a blog using Emacs

By coincidence, I've been investigating various blogging solutions that integrate with org-mode.

O-blog is pretty good, but it suffers from having horrible defaults that break when your org file isn't structured to its expectations. It also does too much by default, and there's no simple way to tell it not to do some of these things. Pretty much all customization depends on you understanding a bunch of template layouts with embedded elisp and how they all fit together. Ideally, you'd want to be able to toggle various features via Customize or your init file, but o-blog ships with defaults that make this a lot of work.

The baked-in Bootstrap integration is also something I could do without. I don't see why an org exporter needs to know anything about layout, truthfully; just export HTML or Markdown of your subtree and let a dedicated static site generator do the work. O-blog really needs to separate its concerns here and set some sane defaults.

The solution I settled on is a slightly-tweaked version of the relatively ancient org-jekyll package. I can blog from any org file by setting a :blog: tag on a subtree, and customizing Jekyll is really simple. Plus I can utilize the existing universe of Jekyll plugins without pulling my hair out.