Setting up a blog with Emacs on GitLab

I finally had to look for a new solution to host my blog (which is mostly inactive anyways). I previously hosted this on a virtual server with 1&1 but they discontinued their student program and thus it was too expensive.

Fortunately there are many more options to host something as simple as html files. GitLab was the second option I looked into, they started offering their service this april. The feature that convinced me was the https that you get without having to do anything.

Styling

I really liked the default look of the theme so I decided to keep most of it, barring a couple changes:

The default font has been replaced by a sans-serif font for most of the text. That misaligned the items so I specified another rule for them to still use a monospaced font to get the alignment right.
The “Comments” header still shows up, even when you do not have any system set up for it. That made me delete the corresponding lines in footer.mustache.
I removed the search bar in the upper right and the link to Github.

I also changed the body text color to a darker color and removed the styling for hyper links.

Mini conclusion

Overall I am pretty happy with it. A minor nitpick is the lack of an RSS feed that will have the entire blogs text.

If the principle it not really clear how org-page works then you can have a look at the official documentation or at a blog post I really liked. In essence you put all org files into the source branch and calling (op/do-publication) will populate your master branch so you don't really need to touch it.