[Haskell-cafe] Thoughts on Hakyll vs. Octopress for an experienced Haskeller but HTML newbie

[Joey Eremondi]

Disclaimer: Cross-posted at 
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/23xgzf/thoughts_on_hakyll_vs_octopress_for_an/

I'm starting a personal website/blog, just the typical thing you see a lot 
of programmers keeping. I'm looking at using Github Pages, but as I don't 
want to hand-code everything, I'll be using a static site generator. I'm 
choosing between Hakyll and Octopress, but I wanted to get some opinions 
before I put in the effort of learning and installing one.

I'll start by saying that I'm comfortable with Monads, EDSLs, and Haskell 
in general. Conversely, I have next to no HTML/CSS skill. What I'm really 
wondering is, how much hand-HTML does Hakyll require you to do?

In particular:

   1. 
   
   Does Hakyll have any support for visual "themes"? If not, are there 
   libraries/examples of visual layouts I could choose from?
   2. 
   
   Does Hakyll integrate well with Github pages?
   3. 
   
   How hard is it to get things like a Facebook like button, twitter 
   sidebar, comments, etc. working in Hakyll? Is there anything equivalent to Octopress's 
   plugins <http://octopress.org/docs/blogging/plugins/>?
   4. 
   
   Octopress advertises itself as dealing well with code snippets. Does 
   Hakyll deal well with code within pages?
   
I realize that many of these things will not be built into Hakyll, so cases 
where it's not built in but there are lots of easy examples to take from 
are welcome.

Reccomendations of one over the other are welcome, but I'm more looking for 
feedback and knowledge from people who have used Hakyll (and Octopress, 
though that's more tangential to this subreddit).

Thanks!

EDIT: Generalized to "comments" instead of just "disqus comments"
 
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