Hakyll Setup

As blogging software, I use the really rather nice Hakyll, by Jasper Van der Jeugt. This is a static website generator written in Haskell, and it’s a great solution for smaller blogs or personal websites.

Hakyll works just fine out of the box, but the blog setup I wanted was a bit different from what I’ve seen other people do with it, so a bit of hacking was required. I wanted to share some of the things I’ve done, since they might be of interest to other Hakyllers (Hakyllites?). All the code is available on Github.

I was going to write some sort of extensive description of what I’d done, but it makes more sense just to point at some places in the code. There are three source files, blog.hs which has all the main Hakyll-required definitions, Overrides.hs which contains definitions of some functions from the Hakyll libraries that I override, and TikZ.hs which contains my slightly rough around the edges code for converting images represented as TikZ code into SVG for inclusion in web pages.

Here are the “highlights”:

• blog.hs lines 109-115, and functions makeIndexPages, makeIndexPage and indexNavLink: most of the material for splitting articles across index pages, generating the index pages and the links between them. The only tricky bit here was figuring out just how to get the Hakyll metacompilation feature working right.

• blog.hs, function addTeaser: this is used to generate the article extract that appears on the index pages, and is a slight elaboration of a suggestion of Jasper’s; the only nasty is fixing up the URLs for any images that appear in the teaser so that they refer to the right directory under the posts hierarchy.

• various places in blog.hs and Overrides.hs: code to allow me to use a more “Wordpressy” article naming convention, i.e. yyyy/mm/dd/title instead of Hakyll’s default yyyy-mm-dd-title.ext. I like to keep image files and other resources next to the text of articles, and this helps me to do that.

• everything in TikZ.hs: a while ago, when I was trying to write my own blog framework in Haskell, I had the idea of using TikZ to represent inline images in articles, and I cobbled up something to render TikZ code into SVG for embedding. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m now undecided about it, mostly because I’ve not yet been able to get SVG font styling working properly. Getting the size of SVGs right in Chrome turns out to be a bit of a headache too. Still, the code is there: it uses htlatex to do the conversion, and it seems to work.

I’m not exactly the world’s best Haskell programmer, and some of this stuff could do with some polishing. The processTikZs function in TikZ.hs in particular is a bit grim, including a use of the pattern (id &&& f) >>> (arr (\(x, fx) -> blah x fx)) that I seemed to find myself using often enough that it looked like there ought to be a standard combinator for it, but for which I couldn’t find one in Control.Arrow. It’s the first time I’ve used arrows though, so I was just happy to end up with something that worked!

For what it’s worth, all the code is free for reuse.