Publish a single file with emacs org-mode

I recently lost a dynamic page to crackers. I could not recover the content from all the spam which flooded it. It was called good news and I had wanted to gather positive news which encourage getting active - but I never really found the time to get it running. See what is left of it: http://gute-neuigkeiten.de

Any dynamic page carries a big maintenance cost, because I have to update all the time to keep it safe from spammers who want to abuse it for commercial spam - in the least horrible case. I can choose a managed solution, but that makes me dependant on the hoster providing what I need. Or I can take the sledgehammer and just use a static site: It never does any writes to the webserver, so there is nothing to hack.

As you can see, that’s what I’m doing nowadays.

Because after having used MacOS for almost a decade and then various visual-oriented programs for another five years, Emacs is nowadays the program which is most convenient to me. It achieves a level of integration and usability which is still science-fiction in other systems - at least when you’re mostly working with text.

And Org-mode is to Emacs as Emacs is to the Operating System: It begins as a simple todo-list and accompanies you all the way towards programming, reproducible research - and publishing websites.

Currently I first publish the single file to FTP and then rename it to index.html. This translates to the following publish settings:

(setq private-publish-ftp-proj (concat "/ftp:" USER "@" HOST ":arnebab/proj/"))

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      '(("orgmode-single-file"
         :base-directory "~/.emacs.d/private/journal"
         :publishing-directory (concat private-publish-ftp-proj "orgmode-single-file/")
         :base-extension "org"
         :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
         :completion-function (lambda () (let ((htmlfile (concat private-publish-ftp-proj 
                                                                 "orgmode-single-file/2013-11-25-Mo-publish-single-file-org-mode.html")))
                                           (if (file-exists-p htmlfile)
                                             (rename-file htmlfile
                                                          (concat private-publish-ftp-proj 
                                                                  "orgmode-single-file/index.html") t))))
         :section-numbers nil
         :with-toc t
         :html-preamble t
         :exclude ".*"
         :include ["2013-11-25-Mo-publish-single-file-org-mode.org"])))

Now I can use C-c C-e P x orgmode-single-file to publish this file to the webserver whenever I change it (or just C-c C-e P a to publish all changed projects).

Note the (lambda ()): I simply rename the published to index.html, because I did not find out, how to use a file as index.html by just setting an option. :index-filename did not work. But likely I missed something which would make this much nicer.

Also note that if I had wanted to publish a folder full of files, this would have been much easier: There actually is an option to create an automatic index-file and sitemap.

For more details, read the org-mode publishing guide.

This is not as simple as I would like it to be. Maybe (or rather: likely) there is a simpler way. But I can now publish arbitrary org-mode files to my webserver without much effort (and without having to switch context so some other program). And that’s something I’ve been missing for a long time, so I’m very happy to finally have it.

And it was less pain that I feared, though publishing this via my drupal-site, too, obviously shows that I’m still far from moving to static pages for everything. For work-in-progress, this is great, though - for example for my Basics for Guile Scheme.