[Haskell-cafe] Help starting a Haskell blog

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 6:35 AM, Peter Verswyvelen<bugfact at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm going start my very first blog, documenting my everyday struggle to
> switch my old imperative mind to the lazy functional setting, with a focus
> on FRP.
> Although you can find a lot of articles that provide help to get started
> with general blogging, it might be useful to pick a blog in which presenting
> Haskell code is easy (e.g. like hpaste that does the syntax coloring for
> you), and where users can give feedback, providing code, also with syntax
> coloring preferably. It would also be nice to allow hyperlinking every
> function in the code to the standard Haskell library docs or to the docs on
> Hackage.
> Googling for "how to start a Haskell blog" just revealed a lot of Haskell
> blogs.
> Could you share your experiences with me about starting a blog?
> BTW: I'm on Windows.
> Thanks a lot,
> Peter Verswyvelen

Being a lazy person, I would just use Gitit. There are a lot of
advantages to doing so.

You get the highlighting-kate syntax-hilighting for your Haskell code
(and your Scheme code and your...); you get a server; you get various
plugins like interwiki links to all the Wikipedias and Wikias or
graphviz image generation; you get RSS feeds for pages*, such as your
Front Page so you can in effect have your Front Page be a blog just by
writing articles and adding to the Front Page a link to them; you get
sane markup (either Markup, Markdown, or literate Haskell), which
*won't* mangle, spindle, and fold whatever you write**; you get a nice
Git or Darcs repo of your writings which you can share or backup; etc.

About the only disadvantages to this lightweight blogging approach are
that the wiki might not look 'blog-like' unless you edit the CSS/HTML,
and Gitit currently doesn't allow anonymous page creation or edits of
the Discussion pages. (I'm fairly sure Gitit is supposed to work on
Windows, also.)

* HEAD only
** sad to say, not something that can be assumed; more than once I've
seen Haskell-related blog posts or comments get mangled by the
blogging software

-- 
gwern