Restructured and Added Some Automation for This Blog

I have been avoiding changing things up in this blog even though I really should have done this a long time ago. There were several things I did not like so much about it:

Having to Have a Working Haskell Environment

To actually generate the site, I needed to do the following:

• stack build - this builds the executable called site that consumes content in posts/ and churns out HTML files.
• stack exec site build - this runs the site executable and builds the HTML files, which are stored in _site/.

Since everything is built offline, a working Haskell environment was necessary.

Lots of Manual Steps

As stated above, since the generated HTML files are in _site/, I needed to find a way to get GH pages to host them. The way I did it was to have another separate repo, make sure _site/ is pointing to that repo, then run stack exec site build, check that things are generated correctly in _site, and finally push to both this repo and the actual GH pages repo.

Now that I’m not employed and have some free time, I decided it was finally time to make it more usable and generally encourage myself to post more often. Here’s what I did:

Deprecate the Old GH Pages Repo and Just Use This One

This should be quite obvious - there’s a tutorial that tells you how to change your executable’s target directory from _site/ to docs/. I can just ditch the old repo, rename the Haskell repo to usefulalgorithm.github.io, and have its page deployed from docs/ in the main branch. I’m pretty sure the directory has to be called docs/ and not anything else though.

Build & Deploy from GH Actions

I’ve done a bunch of GH actions in my previous job and found them to be a huge time saver. So what I wanted to do is just update Markdown files in posts/, and then trigger the Haskell commands from within the action runner.

Some things I hope to do in the near future. These aren’t hard in themselves but probably require a little bit more consideration.

Post via PRs

Writing Markdown files is still a little annoying, especially when I’m on my phone and just want to post something to my blog. I want to find a way to create posts through pull requests, but I need to think about where to put things like tags and how to format the pull request message into a proper Markdown file.

Repost to Threads (and Possibly Other Platforms)

More often than not, I would repost the published post to my socials. I know social media is like the worst thing that’s happened in 20 years, but I still want people to read what I have to say.