The Reddest Rose Unfolds

I few weeks ago I decided to set up a personal blog, aimed primarily at software development topics, but possibly also containing one or another post about my other interests; climbing/bouldering and writing and performing music. Starting with this post, the blog is now up.

I intend for the blog to be a place that can encourage me to write up ideas and experiences as they pass through in my day-to-day life, however not necessarily with the requirement of thoroughly explaining every essential background detail for the potential reader. Thus, the posts herein will mostly take the form of shorter insights—intended as a future reference for myself as well as, hopefully, for some potential blog readers—along with some deeper dwelling posts in particularly interesting topics. For the former, I will refer to external links for a deeper dive into the details beyond what the content of the particular blog post covers.

Now, as I’m an avid Emacs user it comes as a natural choice to write this blog using org-mode, particularly by means of literate programming via org-babel. The site is generated using Hugo, a lean open-source static site generator, in combination with ox-hugo as an Org exporter backend to Hugo-compatible Markdown. As for the blog theme, a tweaked version of the (no longer maintained) hugo-redlounge Hugo theme by Tom Maiaroto is used.

As a future reminder to myself, I export my org master page to Markdown using org-hugo-export-to-md or, via the ox-hugo hydra, C-c C-e H H. The hugo server -D --navigateToChanged command can be used to dynamically inspect the blog locally while writing new posts, whereas I use hugo to build the site for deployment into my public subdirectory, which is a Git submodule mounting my public repository, dfrib.github.io, into my private org/Hugo backend repository.

Finally, returning to the intended purpose of the blog, I think I can likewise describe it as trying to capture some pieces from my stream of consciousness. As I find bits of awareness to be a good attempt describing one’s consciousness, I think this makes for a good blog title.

Let’s unfold some interesting topics, dear blog, and why not a few template parameter packs along the way.

[…]\
the reddest rose unfolds
(which is ridiculous
in this time, this place,

unseemly, impossible,
even slightly scandalous),
the reddest rose unfolds;
[…]
— H.D., Red Rose and a Beggar, Part 1 (1960)