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This blog is written in Org Mode, exported via ox-hugo, rendered by Hugo with the Congo theme, with Plausible for analytics and hosted on Netlify’s free tier. The entire publishing pipeline lives inside Emacs.

Figure 1: A watchmaker installing a screw-dial movement (retrieved)

Why This Stack #

Plaintext is king. Everything I write — blog posts, planning docs, technical notes — lives in .org files that are version-controlled, greppable, and will outlive every platform I’ve ever used and likely will use. Emacs is where I already think and plan (via org-mode goodies like org-agenda, org-clock, org-capture) and do work; it made no sense to leave that environment just to publish.

ox-hugo bridges the two worlds: I write in Org, export to Markdown, and Hugo does the rest.

The Congo theme gives me a clean foundation that I’ve been gradually bending to my taste — custom shortcodes for sidenotes, collapsible sections, and interactive elements layered on top (though, I’ve done heavy modifications to it, added a whole layer of functionality above it). Netlify handles deployment from a git push. I just need to push and changes are live in 10-20 seconds.

The result is a system that gets out of the way. The friction between having a thought and publishing it is essentially: write the Org subtree, commit, push.

What’s Coming #

I plan to eventually write up the details of this pipeline for anyone that might want to replicate or adapt it. Some of what I’d like to cover: the ox-hugo to Hugo Markdown transpiling step and its Goldmark gotchas Whitespace handling between ox-hugo’s Org export and Hugo’s Goldmark renderer has some surprising edge cases. Worth documenting properly. , Hugo’s rendering lookup order and how to override it cleanly, managing a multi-series blog from a single Org file, and the small quality-of-life decisions that keep the system biased toward writing rather than fiddling.

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