Hello, world
It’s about time I had a blog/journal/mental dumping ground again, and getting this set up was a nice little exercise in system administration and a little bit of Haskell coding.
I mention system administration because this is running on a system with a version of Debian Linux installed that has been continuously upgraded since around 2001. It was both slightly broken and very crufty, but I was able to get plenty of space cleared and get everything up-to-date with few issues.
And I mention Haskell because I’m using two Haskell programs as part of the infrastructure of this site. One is the site engine itself, Hakyll. It’s a customizable build tool that translates from various markup formats to HTML, then assembles all the site’s pieces together.
The second Haskell program I’m using the the Clay CSS generator, which lets me build the CSS rules in a Haskell program in a CSS-like DSL. A short program generates both a flexible semantic grid layout and a baseline grid for managing the vertical rhythm of the text. I am not a master page designer by any means, but I’m happy with the result.
I will share more details about these tools, along with other things I’ve been working on, in entries to follow.