Hakyll is Fun!
Now that the semester is over, and I can take a break from the constant barrage of coding assignments and problems sets that any CS student knows all too well, I decided that I’d take a bit of time to update and add more content to my personal website. I figured that it’d be nice to have some place where I could write things and put them online once in a while, so a blog seemed appropriate.
When I first decided to actually go ahead with this, my first instinct was to simply go through my old routine that I had developed many years ago: Download WordPress, install it on a local server, make a WordPress theme, install plugins, push it to a live server, write things, then spend the rest of my life dealing with security updates and broken plugins.
This time, however, I decided to do something different, and use Hakyll, a Haskell library for generating static sites. Despite having done WordPress theme and plugin development for a while I decided to give Hakyll a try instead for a number of reasons. The main reason is that WordPress really is overkill for a simple site like this. WordPress makes sense for a lot of larger sites that actually use most of the features and plugins that WordPress has to offer, I don’t see myself needing any fancy features like an ecommerce platform anytime soon.
My main reason for actually using Hakyll is simplicity: All I need (and all that most websites need, really) is a way to edit content and display it online, and so a static site generator just makes sense. There’s no need to deal with database errors at inopportune moments, or constant WordPress security updates. It’s nice to be able to simply write up a post in my text editor of choice (I use Sublime), and let Hakyll, once properly setup, do the rest of the work.
The other reason is that it’s an excuse to do a bit of coding in Haskell. I’ve used functional programming before, whether it’s in lisp, somewhat-functional features of Python, or trying to emulate functional programming in C for an OS assignment on file systems. Taking the Programming Languages course at UofT has opened my eyes to the ways of statically-typed pure functional programming. I don’t think I could pass up any opportunity to learn more Haskell, and actually do something fun with it. So far, I’ve made some simple customizations like cleaning up the URLs that Hakyll generates to remove the .html extension, and using LaTeX to render math using MathJax. So now I can typeset nice-looking equations like this:
\[\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2}\, dx = \sqrt{\pi}.\]
Over the next while, this site will probably be somewhat of a playground for experimenting with Hakyll. As I fiddle around with Hakyll some more, I may write more posts going into more detail about my Hakyll setup.
One consequence of using a static site generator is the lack of a comments section, which I don’t particularly mind. I could always add one later if it ever feels necessary, using something like Disqus. Of course, I am happy to receive any comments; if you would like to contact me, my email is on my home page. If you have any suggestions related to this website, the source code, along with all of my posts, are hosted on GitHub, where you can submit issues and pull requests and all that, if you’d like.