I Hate Building Websites, Unless it's org-mode

In fact, I still love the web technology. It is the one technology that I have faith in for the longest time. Even after being burnt so many times, there's something at the core (openness? I guess) that always drag me back. If you think about it, it does sound a lot like emacs. Maybe it says a lot about me, rather than the other way around. Anyway...

Recently, I gradually lost interest in the frontend optimization game after being disappointed for too long with the frontend development landscape dominated by React and big tech. I started to move my attention back to things at the foundation level. Now I am interested in the tooling themselves. Vite is an amazing piece of software. So I built a vite based "framework" myself -- orga-build.

You can't even call it a framework, since it's so barebone and simple. Maybe just a simple vite plugin, based on my work on orgajs (org-mode parser). It's relatively simple to make a Astro clone but for org-mode files. Well Astro clone with all the bells and whistles removed, simply transform your org files to html.

This entire website it built with orga-build. The aim is for the tech to simply go away, so (if it works correctly 🤞) you can simply point it to a folder of org files, it will give you a publishable website.

It supports nested layout, special reusable components (all written in jsx/tsx, I did say I don't like React, but in my opinion, jsx the best templating language for writing websites so far, jsx != React). Or simply put a page.tsx in the folder to create a custom page. But those features are all opt-in based, you can find out more in the project page. unlike other frontend dev frameworks, vomit out a million files to show a click counter. I am simply tired.

I've actually been working on this for a while, and I think it's now feature-complete enough to generate a real website like this. I'd say it's ready to use.