Overriding org-html-headline or other export functions?

[Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov>]

Hi,

I am writing a manual in Org which gets exported/published to HTML and
styled with org-html-themes.  I want the HTML to include a little icon
next to each headline which is a direct link to the headline itself.
Basically, I want to rip off what GitHub does when it renders Org.

First, is there some way to achieve this headline link without
explicitly adding it in the Org text or diving into Org Elisp?

I couldn't find one so I took the latter route by copying out the whole
of org-html-headline into the Emacs init Elisp file I used for
publishing and fiddle with it until I got more or less what I wanted.
Here are the lines tweaked:

  https://github.com/WireCell/wire-cell-docs/blob/master/manuals/publish.el#L69

Here is an example of the result:

  http://www.phy.bnl.gov/~bviren/wirecell.github.io/manual.html

Is this copy+hack the proper way to tweak the exporting in this case?
In particular, I worry about my copy of org-html-headline diverging from
the real.


I read about export filters and extending an existing back-end, but I
think these do not apply, but maybe I have that wrong.

Thanks for any suggestions!

-Brett.