Motivation

It had been a while since my last post, I did want do some writings but didn’t make it. I felt the Hakyll stack is too complex for me:

• I rarely write Haskell now,
• I don’t want to install a full stack of GHC to just build a blog, especially it takes me for 30 mins,
• I found makefile + pandoc is flexible enough when I wrote my dissertation for M.S degree using only pandoc and \LaTeX.

After this, I decided to switch a different static-site generator(SSG). However, most SSGs don’t fulfill my requirements:

• use pandoc as converter and easily integrates with filter
• easy to hack

So I ended up writing my own blog generator.

Current Implementation

The tools I used:

• GNU Make, for building the whole site
• pandoc, for converting Markdown file to HTML
• sidenote.lua with pandoc-tufte-css
• A python script extracts YAML front matter from posts and generates a YAML file feed into pandoc, for generating aggregated pages like “Archive”, “Recently Posts”, …

Next steps

• generates RSS feed