Site reboot

After a long hiatus, I’ve decided to revamp my personal website, and this blog along with it.

I’m not sure when I first slapped up a website on this domain. It must have been 2003 at the latest, though. At the time, I was a graduate student in Philosophy and my little head was filled with Classical Greek and Aristotle, with little room for html. I believe the site consisted of a bunch of hastily assembled html files, probably versioned by sending them occasionally to my own email account. I wish I’d kept the files, even though I’m sure they would make me cringe now. Later, I added a WordPress blog that I used for teaching purposes. I probably also started using PHP at some point to glue page fragments together so that I wouldn’t have to copy and paste too much.

When I left graduate school in 2008 with the ambition of writing code for a living, the first thing I did as a learning exercise was to rewrite the site using Django, the Python web framework. This version of the site had a custom blog and a place for me to post links. The code wasn’t especially good, but it wasn’t bad as a beginner effort, and I think it may even have helped me to land my first job.

Fast forward to 2013. I wanted to redo my website partly just for the fun of it, and partly because much of the content was embarrassingly out of date. But I had also realized in the meantime that a dynamic website was probably overkill for me, and that a static website would be extremely simple to host and maintain. I also wanted to start blogging again, and I thought a static website written in markdown would be the easiest way to let me spend even more of my day in Emacs than I was already spending.

Since I’ve been especially interested in Haskell lately, I chose Hakyll , a static website generator written in Haskell, for this iteration of the site. It’s been a delight. Hakyll’s documentation is excellent, and the maintainer is extremely responsive on the mailing list. Indeed, he was so responsive that I managed to overcome my shyness and have my first ever (admittedly very modest) pull request on github accepted on the project.

So enjoy, and perhaps now that I have a shiny new site I’ll be tempted to write more often.