RSSAfter few hours of code improvement, the blog is now in a much better state. The biggest things missing are the RSS feeds and the wiki text engine, but apart from those, this is shaping to be a blog that i can finally use.
Compared to the hundreds of codebase for blog software, one might wonders why did i need to re-invent a new software or if it's just one a NIH syndrome. There's at least 2 features that were necessary, before i could actually have a blog productively:
- just text files: this is the biggest feature for me, since i want to be able to write my blog posts in vim or a curse interface on local files then synchronize the whole lot to the server that display them to the world. I also believe relational database are way overkill for basic usage like a personal website, but are also much slower [1] than a custom solution
- completly written in haskell: I'm more and more careful about what are serving things to the outside world, and that's why i'm phasing out all dynamic languages (python, perl, ruby, php) that need to be throughly tested and re-tested after every modifications. Not only that but those language are magnitude slower than Haskell. I'm also still learning Haskell, hence that's a really good test bed for me.
Haskell is absolutely amazing at everything i've tried so far. embedded parsing is a delight thanks to parsec, the static typing increase the productivity massively, and the rich library / expressiveness makes all those software design easy to shape.
This blog software is also one of the software brick for something bigger.
[1] whilst it's hard to judge the whole performance issue, I think the main issue with available database are the layer on top of the filesystem and the SQL engine.