Daily Notes for 2024-01-11

Secrets of the Ancients 🔗

I felt a little nostalgic for my old ox-hugo setup today. What was so great about it?

• One big org file.
• Your stuff ends up in a regular Markdown file for portability.
• Pretty nicely wired up in Doom’s menu structure: SPC X b d and a daily post is underway.

I took a look in config.org and it looked like all the config was still there, so I started a daily post. type type type type type … saaaaave? What was supposed to happen next? Whatever it was, it didn’t happen. I tried the whole “close your eyes and start typing” thing to see if muscle memory would take over, but no … I hadn’t used this setup since last June and it was gone from my fingers.

More fiddling and fussing – it turned out there was no muscle memory to forget because I’d had it set up to autopublish on save. One of the cool things about ox-hugo is that if you leave a post heading in TODO state, it’s a draft, so saving and auto-publishing is safe, even if you forget and wander off and push another commit somewhere.

But saving availed me nothing … huh … more poking.

Oh, right … I took ox-hugo out of my packages.el when I stopped using it to keep things light.

Now it’s working again.

And wow did I just elide a ton of stuff I had so step back through to get it to where it “just worked” again. My config.org was full of helpful notes like:

Of particular interest: org-hugo-auto-set-lastmod, which is set 't in a lot of examples. This one is pesky because when set 't it will bump the date on posts that don’t have a date: property set (in favor of org-hugos EXPORT_HUGO_DATE). You don’t get bit until you have org-hugo-auto-export-on-save set, at which point fat-fingering a save in the wrong post will change its mod date and hence its published date, teleporting it into the future.

… but the whole setup was still littered with stuff I couldn’t understand. Like …

 COMMENT Local Variables :ARCHIVE:
# Local Variables:
# eval: (org-hugo-auto-export-mode t)
# End:

Why the COMMENT thing? Why the ARCHIVE thing? Why “End:” I don’t remember how I learned that stuff or why it is what it is. I am pretty sure there were 10th century Saxon peasants who understood more about how ancient Roman highways were engineered than I was able to understand about my own setup.

I don’t think, the day before I was let go from, er, “Puppet by Perforce” that I imagined I’d spend as much time as I did doinking around with org-mode blogging, but wow did I. It was fun. I can tell it was fun because I was leaving myself paragraph-long notes on minor configuration issues.