Blogging with Gleam, Org-Mode and Pandoc

The author describes a workflow that keeps writing, computation and publication anchored inside Emacs by using Org-mode as the single source format and a small, typed toolchain to produce a static site. Drafts live as .org files with embedded d2 diagrams and Babel code blocks; Pandoc is used as a reliable converter (org → GitHub-flavored Markdown with citeproc and BibLaTeX support) augmented by three Lua filters (verse, bibliography, images). A Gleam program orchestrates conversion, skipping up-to-date files and invoking Pandoc; Blogatto consumes the generated Markdown and, with Lustre for HTML composition, produces pages and an RSS feed. Example Gleam code demonstrates a type-checked posts_page that renders a sorted list of posts.

The argument is that Org-mode’s interactive, reproducible document model is superior to writing Markdown directly because it integrates code execution, citations and generated artifacts inside the editor. Pandoc is intentionally treated as a stable boundary rather than teaching the site generator to parse Org directly. Nix flakes and devenv pin and reproduce the build environment so make run / make dev are mundane operations. The result is a consciously tool-rich but narrowly decomposed pipeline: Emacs for authoring, Pandoc for conversion, Gleam+Lustre+Blogatto for site generation, and Nix for reproducibility.