readme.md

This is the source code for my personal site. It is based directly on the code for Ruud van Asseldonk's site. The site uses a custom static site generator written in Haskell.

Here's a description of the generator written by Ruud van Asseldonk, from his readme.md:

The generator includes a tiny templating engine, an html and css minifier, and an aggressive font subsetter. One of my objectives was to cut all the crap (which almost by definition includes javascript) without compromising on design. An average page of my site weighs less than jQuery alone (which describes itself as “lightweight footprint”). That includes webfonts.

I have disabled the clever webfont subsetting support, because instead I am using some popular fonts served by google. My reasoning is that for many users these will be cached.

Installing dependencies

stack

stack is a tool for building Haskell code. For many unix-ey systems, the following will do:

$ curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh

Otherwise see the installation docs. Once this is done, run stack setup within this directory to install ghc:

$ stack setup

Compression tools

By default these aren't needed - only needed if relevant code in Main.hs is uncommented.

$ sudo apt install zopfli brotli

How to do quick iterative writing / modification

I like to be able to modify the Haskell, templates, and markdown, and quickly see the results. In other words, I want to be able to just save files, and have the browser automatically update. My current approach is a bit of a mishmash of tools. I'd like something better, but it works well enough. Here's how I'm currently doing this:

Install ghcid and livereload

ghcid automates reloading code in ghci, Haskell's interpreter. Code gets reloaded whenever source files change.

livereload is an node server that can be used with the livereload chrome plugin to cause the browser to reload after changes.

$ stack install ghcid
$ npm install -g livereload

Run ghcid

Then, in one terminal run the following:

$ ghcid -r :main

This runs ghcid, which reads the .ghcid file, configuring it to watch a few directories for changes.

Run python3 http server

Then in another terminal, run the following:

$ cd out
$ python3 -m http.server

This runs a web server that serves the output of site generation.

Run livereload

Then, in yet another terminal, run the following:

$ cd out
$ livereload

License

Like Ruud's site, the source code for this site is licensed under version 3 of the the GNU General Public Licence. See the licence file. The content of the posts is licensed under the Creative Commons BY SA licence. For the font license details, see the readme in the fonts directory.