Webpage Reloaded

This is my very first post. It also coincides with the entire rewriting of my homepage and these two events are not independent. I used to use a set of Makefiles for dependency checks, pandoc for generating html, m4 for templating and no css. The stuff worked but it soon became difficult to maintain.

It was more or less clear to me from the start that I wanted a static site managed via darcs, written in markdown. Of course there is jekyll but I always thought pandoc was way more powerful than some of the other markdown processors that comes with jekyll. And then I heard of hakyll. It uses pandoc as its markdown processor which means that I get all the pandoc goodies: easy math integration, syntax highlighting, and possibility of using different input (say latex) and output (say pdf) formats. Besides, it is written in my favorite programming language. No more excuses for a bad homepage.

I never thought my page would ever be styled with css. As a language (if you can call it one) css is pretty lousy, maybe slightly better than html. Besides, no two browser seems to agree on the standard. Who, in their right senses would want to work with it ? Compass made me change my opinion. Firstly, you can use the sass now instead of css, an advantage comparable to using markdown instead of html. Secondly, it has mixins that take care of all (most) of those browser incompatibilities. It might not go well with IE users: I don’t know, neither do I care to know. But it should work mostly. The style for this page is entirely written in sass using the compass framework. I will publish the source code soon after some refactoring.

Thanks to the great softwares mentioned above, I now have a clean homepage complete with a blog and atom/rss feeds. Some lecture notes that I had are not yet hakyllised. It will soon be.

A big thank you to the folks behind hakyll, pandoc and compass.

Update 18 May 2013: I have added my old wrtings as blog post. So it might appear as if this not my first post.