diff --git a/posts/migrating-to-yocaml.md b/posts/migrating-to-yocaml.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c93128 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/migrating-to-yocaml.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +title: Migrating to YOCaml +date: 2023-11-17 +--- + +About a decade ago I created a blog on this website. +It hasn't seen all that much use with about one post per year on average. +Anyway, this article is not about how much or little I publish here. +Originally I used [Hakyll][hakyll] and I wrote about it in one of the [first posts][hakyll-post]. +It is written in Haskell, and you configure your web site using Haskell. +This was great. +Then eventually my interest in Haskell dwindled to nothing and I no longer cared for maintaining the web site configuration. +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). +Then I deleted all the Haskell bits on my machine in order to reclaim disk space. +This was bad because then I no longer had the binary, and Hakyll had evolved and my project was no longer easy to build. + +For several years I was no longer able to easily publish new posts on my blog. +I had to manually edit html files whenever I wanted to publish something. +It isn't all *that* bad to write html by hand - it's certainly doable if rather tedious. +It was an unnecessary barrier to publishing. + +Since I wrote the first post the functional programming language [OCaml][ocaml] became my language of choice, +and I [work][robur] professionally with OCaml since a few years. +I looked at a few tools in OCaml to generate static web sites, but none of them really enticed me. +[Sesame][sesame] seemed promising to me at first, and the automatic rescaling of images and responsive images got me excited. +However, I encountered [several issues][sesame-issues] the author didn't seem so responsive to. +Then my colleague [@dinosaure](https://blog.osau.re/) introduced me to [YOCaml][yocaml]! +The learning curve was steep, and the library is written in a, in my opinion, unusual style for OCaml. +After getting the hang of it I started to like it and finally I have migrated my website to a setup built on YOCaml. +Hopefully this will be easier and more fun for me to maintain, and the frequency of posts will hopefully go up. + +The code to process blog posts, at the time of writing anyway, is reproduced below: +```OCaml +open Yocaml +module Metaformat = Yocaml_yaml +module Markup = Yocaml_cmark +module Template = Yocaml_jingoo +let article_target file target = Model.article_path file |> into target +(* ... *) + +let process_articles target = + let open Build in + process_files [ "posts" ] File.is_markdown (fun article_file -> + create_file (article_target article_file target) + (Metaformat.read_file_with_metadata (module Model.Article) article_file + >>> Markup.content_to_html ~strict:false () + >>> Template.apply_as_template (module Model.Article) "templates/article.html" + >>> Template.apply_as_template (module Model.Article) "templates/layout.html" + >>^ Stdlib.snd)) +``` +Markdown files with their yaml metadata header are read, +the markdown is converted to html using [cmarkit][cmarkit] in non-strict[^strict] mode, +a `layout.html` template is applied after an `article.html` template is applied. +This means I can write in markdown with some metadata such as publishing date and title, +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. +Then finally the super nice layout I stole from some other website is applied to every page has a consistent look. + +On my TODO list for this website is to look into automatic rescaling of image and responsive images, and adding a feed. +The former I suspect is less straightforward and may require some annoying processing. +I expect it is not something I will achieve easily. +The latter is more straightforward and I hope to get it done Soon™. + +[hakyll]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ +[hakyll-post]: /posts/2013-10-19-12-00-hakyll.html +[ocaml]: https://ocaml.org/ +[robur]: https://robur.coop/ +[sesame]: https://patricoferris.github.io/sesame/sesame/index.html +[sesame-issues]: https://github.com/patricoferris/sesame/issues?q=author%3Areynir +[yocaml]: https://yocaml.github.io/doc/yocaml/index.html +[cmarkit]: https://erratique.ch/software/cmarkit/doc/Cmarkit/index.html + +[^strict]: Non-strict mode in `cmarkit` means commonmark extensions are enabled such as foot notes like this one.