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itihas/publish-review

Build system for the website!

Why is it in elisp?

Mostly because it's what I usually export one-off things in whenever I have had to send somebody something in here in the past. But also because this lets me use the same functions in publication as the notebook's engine itself uses, namely org-mode, org-roam, and citar.

What's it do?

  • resolves org-id links.
  • renders org-cite citations using my Better BiBTeX exported bibliography.bib that contains my entire Zotero library. It currently does this poorly.
  • finds backlinks and puts them at the bottom of each note.
  • gives everything CSS classes, so that my org.css has a rich lexicon of objects to refer to
  • copies over the static resources that org-download puts in the static/ directories.

What would I move to, if I could?

  • Astro: 2025's version of this website's publication used rasendubi/braindump as a base to riff off of. I developed an understudied hatred of Next.js, a moodboard and PoC for how references could work, and not much else. I retain fondness for Oleksii Schmoalko's approach to website building, but am not very clear on if I want to re-enter the world of JS-based static site generation.
  • Hakyll: maybe one day I'll be a real boy proper grown up DevOps-adjacent functional programmer, and find the time to burn writing the leftover bits of org parsing in Haskell that aren't covered by Pandoc. Although in the year of our Claude 2026, who knows! Maybe this is within reach without having to feel guilty over the time I'm spending doing something that is neither optimally fun nor optimally productive.
  • Custom static site generation: See above. It wouldn't be much more work.

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