Updates to my ox-hugo publishing setup

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2020 329 words 2 minutes

My previous post was mostly a way to test updates to how I handle images and publish posts using Org mode and ox-hugo.

New posts are created using the following Org mode capture template.

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(with-eval-after-load 'org-capture
  (defun org-hugo-new-subtree-post-capture-template ()
    "Returns `org-capture' template string for new Hugo post.
See `org-capture-templates' for more information."
    (let* ((title (read-from-minibuffer "Post Title: ")) ;Prompt to enter the post title
           (fname (org-hugo-slug title))
           (date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")))
      (mapconcat #'identity
                 `(
                   ,(concat "* TODO " title)
                   ":PROPERTIES:"
                   ,(concat ":EXPORT_FILE_NAME: " date "-" fname)
                   ":END:"
                   "%?\n")          ;Place the cursor here finally
                 "\n")))

  (add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
               '("h"                ;`org-capture' binding + h
                 "Hugo post"
                 entry
                 ;; Make sure this file exists. I shouldn't hard-code the path but
                 ;; it's not in org-directory so oh well.
                 (file+olp "~/Dropbox/pub/baty.net-hugo/content-org/posts.org" "Posts" "2020")
                 (function org-hugo-new-subtree-post-capture-template))))

This is nearly identical to the one offered in the ox-hugo docs except that I prepend an ISO date as part of the exported file name.

New posts are added to the Posts->2020 heading in ./content-org/posts.org.

One of my least favorite things about using static site generators is that images are harder to manage. I’m letting org-attach handle most of it. Image files dragged into posts.org are copied to ./content-org/attach/ and automatically renamed and linked in the post. I use the following setting:

(setq org-attach-id-dir "./attach")

When exporting the Markdown file, ox-hugo puts any attachments in ./static/ox-hugo/. At first I was put off by this since all my other images go into ./static/img/YYYY, but I came to realize that it makes sense to isolate them in their own directory so it’s easy to spot that they are managed by ox-hugo. I may change this at some point.

I sometimes feel that the extra level of abstraction introduced by going from Org->Markdown->HTML is a bit much, but it sure is clever and makes writing and publishing easy and pleasant.