73 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
73 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: Migrating to YOCaml
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date: 2023-11-17
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---
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About a decade ago I created a blog on this website.
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It hasn't seen all that much use with about one post per year on average.
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Anyway, this article is not about how much or little I publish here.
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Originally I used [Hakyll][hakyll] and I wrote about it in one of the [first posts][hakyll-post].
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It is written in Haskell, and you configure your web site using Haskell.
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This was great.
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Then eventually my interest in Haskell dwindled to nothing and I no longer cared for maintaining the web site configuration.
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This was alright because the hakyll website binary was still there and I could use it to build my blog whenever I published something (which was rare).
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Then I deleted all the Haskell bits on my machine in order to reclaim disk space.
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This was bad because then I no longer had the binary, and Hakyll had evolved and my project was no longer easy to build.
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For several years I was no longer able to easily publish new posts on my blog.
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I had to manually edit html files whenever I wanted to publish something.
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It isn't all *that* bad to write html by hand - it's certainly doable if rather tedious.
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It was an unnecessary barrier to publishing.
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Since I wrote the first post the functional programming language [OCaml][ocaml] became my language of choice,
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and I [work][robur] professionally with OCaml since a few years.
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I looked at a few tools in OCaml to generate static web sites, but none of them really enticed me.
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[Sesame][sesame] seemed promising to me at first, and the automatic rescaling of images and responsive images got me excited.
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However, I encountered [several issues][sesame-issues] the author didn't seem so responsive to.
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Then my colleague [@dinosaure](https://blog.osau.re/) introduced me to [YOCaml][yocaml]!
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The learning curve was steep, and the library is written in a, in my opinion, unusual style for OCaml.
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After getting the hang of it I started to like it and finally I have migrated my website to a setup built on YOCaml.
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Hopefully this will be easier and more fun for me to maintain, and the frequency of posts will hopefully go up.
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The code to process blog posts, at the time of writing anyway, is reproduced below:
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```OCaml
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open Yocaml
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module Metaformat = Yocaml_yaml
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module Markup = Yocaml_cmark
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module Template = Yocaml_jingoo
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let article_target file target = Model.article_path file |> into target
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(* ... *)
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let process_articles target =
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let open Build in
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process_files [ "posts" ] File.is_markdown (fun article_file ->
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create_file (article_target article_file target)
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(Metaformat.read_file_with_metadata (module Model.Article) article_file
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>>> Markup.content_to_html ~strict:false ()
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>>> Template.apply_as_template (module Model.Article) "templates/article.html"
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>>> Template.apply_as_template (module Model.Article) "templates/layout.html"
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>>^ Stdlib.snd))
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```
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Markdown files with their yaml metadata header are read,
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the markdown is converted to html using [cmarkit][cmarkit] in non-strict[^strict] mode,
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a `layout.html` template is applied after an `article.html` template is applied.
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This means I can write in markdown with some metadata such as publishing date and title,
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have the markdown-converted-to-html put into a consistent format with a header consisting of a heading with the title and information about the article.
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Then finally the super nice layout I stole from some other website is applied to every page has a consistent look.
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On my TODO list for this website is to look into automatic rescaling of image and responsive images, and adding a feed.
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The former I suspect is less straightforward and may require some annoying processing.
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I expect it is not something I will achieve easily.
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The latter is more straightforward and I hope to get it done Soon™.
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[hakyll]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/
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[hakyll-post]: /posts/2013-10-19-12-00-hakyll.html
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[ocaml]: https://ocaml.org/
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[robur]: https://robur.coop/
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[sesame]: https://patricoferris.github.io/sesame/sesame/index.html
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[sesame-issues]: https://github.com/patricoferris/sesame/issues?q=author%3Areynir
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[yocaml]: https://yocaml.github.io/doc/yocaml/index.html
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[cmarkit]: https://erratique.ch/software/cmarkit/doc/Cmarkit/index.html
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[^strict]: Non-strict mode in `cmarkit` means commonmark extensions are enabled such as foot notes like this one.
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