Leaving Wordpress for Emacs

My old website was based on Wordpress, which I loved for many reasons. It was easy to add plugins, it was easy to switch templates and it was database driven. But ultimately, it was the McMansion/Escalade of blogging engines. Too much for what I needed and too costly to maintain. It required updates monthly and it was frequently under attack.

What I really wanted was something that would jive with my workflow and provide some basic elements. For me, blogging from emacs made perfect sense. With emacs org mode, I can get code highlighting, latex and other goodies using the programming work flow I use daily. While numerous blogging options for emacs they either required using another tool (like Jekyll or Octopress) or crippled certain emacs features like code highlighting, tex or picture insertion.

So I cobbled together a solution using inspiration from http://howardism.org/, http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-publish-html-tutorial.html and a few other places.

At the end of the day, I have a system that doesn't require me to log on to some clunky webservice and gives me useful features.