Moving from Sinatra to Hakyll

Being a lazy person I decided to learn Haskell (pun not intended). Since learning is a tedious task I usually have to force myself to keep studying. That said, I decided to take an alternative approach to the problem. Insted of mindlessly consuming tutorials and whatnot I decided to take a hands-on approach and move my personal website from a simple Sinatra application to Hakyll.

What’s Hakyll?

If you’re not familiar with static site generators then you might be wondering what is this all about. Those generators basically take your content (say - posts), apply templates to them and save the result as a ready-to-publish static website. “Why bother at all?”, you may ask. Quite simple:

1. You can write your posts in whatever format you want — Hakyll is integrated with Pandoc, a swiss-army knife for text conversion which can read virtually any markup format.
2. You can keep your site under version control. This is a huge feature for me since I can easily return to any state my site was at any given time.
3. Easy deployments — just copy the files over to your server. You just need any kind of HTTP server.

How does that work?

Working on a Hakyll powered site is relatively simple:

1. Write in whatever markup format you want.
2. Write compilation rules in Haskell EDSL. The default rules are definitely enough if you want a simple blog.
3. SHIP IT!

I’m not really going to go into details here. Hakyll has some tutorials which should do the explanation better than me and will teach you how to enhance you site with things such as Atom feed or producing multiple versions of a single file.

Was it worth?

Definitely. I really recommend trying Hakyll out if you are looking for a simple way to create your own homepage. This was also a nice opportunity to brush up on my rusty CSS skills. I also plan to make the source code of this site public at a later point but first I need to check out Clay.