Category: colophonia

One thing I wanted to add to my new and shiny Pollen website was full-text search. I have about 200 old blog articles on here, and it would be convenient to be able to find things now and then. It seemed like an easy enough thing to do, especially since I only intended to do it at the level of software bricolage, using existing tools.

Let's start with a digression.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit that I'm just a tad disappointed with the modern internet. You look back at the visions of the early workers in hypertext and networking, and their open-hearted dreams of a world of free information bring a little tear to the eye. Fast forward to 2021, and the web is 90% spam, social media giants and ad-tech. It's not the shiny future we were promised! It's a swamp.

The alternative title for this article was "The FrankenBlog: It Lives!". You'll see why "FrankenBlog" in a minute.

The idea here was to convert my website and blog over to use Pollen, Matthew Butterick's marvellous Racket-based authoring system. The main reason for wanting to do that is that I have a couple of longer-form writing projects in mind, and Pollen gives much more flexibility than writing in Markdown or something similar.

Starting a new blog with Pollen is easy. Unfortunately, I had some history I wanted to preserve, some new ideas I wanted to try, and a whole row of yaks lined up waiting for a shave.

For my blog, I use Jasper Van der Jeugt's Hakyll system. When I was first looking for a blogging platform, I rejected all the usual choices (Wordpress, etc.), mostly because I'm a borderline obsessive control freak and they didn't give enough configurability. Plus, they weren't Haskell. I started writing my own blogging system, but then I found Hakyll. "Great," I thought, "that's perfect, except I want something almost completely different!"

So, I lied a little in my last post. I didn't quite get to go off right away and update my Beeminder totals, because I had a bit a problem with my blogging software. I use Jasper Van der Jeugt's Hakyll, a Haskell static site generator. Jasper recently (well, not that recently...) released a new major version of Hakyll, Hakyll 4. I had been putting off upgrading because I have so much custom code that it's kind of a big job -- my blog is a little different to most Hakyll sites, so I had to write quite a bit of extra stuff to work around that.

Over the course of the month of January, I: published 24 blog articles. Less than thirty, but not a crushing failure. had 13 days when I didn't write anything, compensated by two days when I wrote 3 articles and 3 days when I wrote two. wrote about 17 articles that I would…

Looking for a prod to jolt me out of an (involuntary) 45 day blogging hiatus, I'm going to follow a scheme that Rita is using quite successfully: the Thirty Day Challenge. The idea is simple. Just do that thing, whatever it is, every day for thirty days. The timescale is short…

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've been meaning to start a blog for some time, but couldn't settle on a platform. I'd used Wordpress before for a little blog we set up to let our friends and family know what we were up to when we moved to Montpellier, and I liked it (easy to install, easy to use). For a personal blog though, I wanted something a bit more hackable (yeah, I know, you can hack on Wordpress too, but if it's going to be for fun, I want to be using something other than PHP!).