A New Site!

After several years of procrastination, I have finally moved my blog away from the bespoke Python setup that I made years ago, long before I knew anything about functional programming. No guarantee that this means I’ll actually start posting again, but at least things are much nicer now!

I decided to use Hakyll, a static site generator written in Haskell. The process was pretty painless. The Hakyll documentation has a large collection of examples that make it pretty quick to figure things out, and I found several useful blogs along the way.

Aside from cosmetics, I made only a few changes to the default template besides enabling MathJax and generating syntax highlighting using Pandoc. The latter was a bit of an annoyance, not because it was difficult to setup, but because of having Pandoc as a dependency. This precluded me from building on my DigitalOcean VM that hosts this site, because apparently Pandoc requires more than the 2GB of memory that I have allocated to build. In general the dependencies are quite heavy.

I considered using GitHub Pages with haskell-actions, which includes some examples of how to cache dependencies with cabal, or integrating with Nix as described here and here. After a good deal of investigation however, I decided against either approach and just did a manual rsync of the generated files after building locally. I truly don’t think I will become such an avid writer in the foreseeable future as to make robust CI a necessity.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hopefully this ushers in a new era of me writing about PL topics!