After not having a site for several years and being in a business that pretty much mandates one, I was wanted to go with the simplest fastest solution possible. After spending countless hours trying out various CMSs including Wordpress, Cargo Collective, and myriad others, I ended up making a really bad choice: Hakyll.
Static site generators really suit my file organization idiosynchrasies–all content cleanly stored in a version controlled file tree with custom transformations used to actually generate content. Jekyll would have been the obvious choice with it’s fantastic GitHub integration but I said F*CK that when I found out there was one written in Haskell, a language I neither know well nor need to know. But at least it is awesome right? Right?
I did do one project a long time ago in Haskell to parse some text. It took me the better of 3 weeks to go through these tutorials and write code that would have otherwise taken me 3 hours.
In retrospect, perhaps something like Square Space would have been exactly what I wanted. Too bad I didn’t hear about until after I put this site live.
tldr; I’ve finally set up my site with Hakyll. I hope I wont want to throw this one in the trash like I’ve done with all my previous sites.
P.S. I wrote this to test out my ‘blog’ section of my new site. Hopefully I will do no such thing again in the future. There are enough people meta blogging about how hard it was to choose the right website backend. #firstworldproblems
P.S.S if it wasn’t clear enough: avoid Haskell like you would avoid grad school.
UPDATE (6-23-2015): The template I was originally using for this site was not at all what I wanted. I was contemplating for a while one of those fancy single page bootstrap portfolio templates that are all the rage these days and also decided against that. Instead, I took a brain trip back to my high school html class and put together the site you see now. I can’t say it was “quick” to do as I still had to fadangle with Hakyll quite a bit to get the custom features I wanted implemented but I’m happy to say it’s basically working good enough now. Maybe you care to read a little bit about the history of this style.
