Nikola Blog Infrastructure

Nikola is a static site generator written in python. It's mostly boring, which is a very good thing for software meant for use to be. Its home is https://getnikola.org and the source is on github at https://github.com/getnikola/nikola. It's many years old at this point, but not dead.

The interesting part for me is that someone had already written a plugin that compiled org mode files, my preferred markup language, to the html that Nikola wants to publish. It wasn't quite to my tastes, but the changes were all on the org export side in elisp, and the python invocation of emacs to do the translation didn't need particular changes. That update is at https://github.com/steve-downey/wctm/tree/src/plugins/orgmode.

I've also set up staging at a github pages repo rendered at https://steve-downey.github.io/ since it's a static site. The real version is at https://sdowney.org.

Conversion was straightforward using the tools that Nikola provided and following the directions for importing a WordPress xml backup.

Pulling a plugin into my working site was easy

nikola plugin -i orgmode

copied the code from https://github.com/getnikola/plugins/tree/master/v8/orgmode and I just had to update the main configuration file, conf.py, to map org files to the orgmode compiler.

COMPILERS = {
    "rest": ['.txt', '.rst'],
    "markdown": ['.md', '.mdown', '.markdown'],
    "html": ['.html', '.htm'],
    "orgmode": ['.org'],
}

I then updated the source code for the elisp html exporter using code from https://github.com/steve-downey/wg21org/blob/main/emacs.d/init.el which installs org from upstream rather than using the built-in orgmode and configures my preferences. I may end up using more of ox-wg21html.el as a framework for the exported HTML, only updating to use Bootstrap for css classes instead of my own or the org builtin.

I've configure Nikola to support LaTeX via KaTeX rather than MathJax. It is supposed to be a bit faster. This means inline math like \(x^2\) or \(1 < 2\) or with breaks like: \[ \int_0^\infty e^{-x^2} dx = {{\sqrt{\pi}} \over {2}} \] Or in running text where I want to mention \[ \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4 a c}}{2a} \] as the quadratic equation. It does mean I don't have access to latex blocks like

\begin{equation}
  n_{i+1} = \frac{n_{i} (d-i) (e-1)}{(i+1)}
\end{equation}

Maybe I won't miss it.