Dog food with a distinct Perl 6 flavor
For a long time, I kept using use Perl
for my blogging, knowing that there are better solutions out there. blogs.perl.org being among the most alluring alternatives. Various Perl 6 bloggers were also reporting happiness with Wordpress-based blogs. Inertia kept me tied to use Perl.
Inertia — and something else. I had a teeny tiny dream that I could make a blogging solution in Perl 6. That would, I theorized, make me ultimately happy.
Except that it would never happen. It's quite a big step to move blogs, and doing it while actually inventing the new blog under oneself... no wai.
And then use Perl
forced my hand. After ~10 years of service, it has now been shut down. And suddenly, I found myself without a blogging platform.
So I thought, what the heck.
A couple of weeks later, here I stand with a working blogging solution in Perl 6. Yay!
I'll have a lot more to say about the blogging software as we go along, but here are the main points in bullet form:
- It's written in Perl 6. (See above.)
- It's currently 200 lines of Perl 6!
- It's a static website generator. (If it weren't for today's speed limitations, it'd probably generate pages dynamically. There is, after all, a wiki engine that pulled that off already two years ago.)
- It outsources Markdown generation to Perl 5. This may or may not be a temporary solution.
- I'm not ready to put it on github yet, but here's a snapshot of the source if you're interested.
- There's a static website generator called Hakyll on which I'm basing the general design of my program. Over time, I hope to push things out into what will eventually become a port of Hakyll. I want to do this while continually running the blog, to make sure things keep working. (Hence the title of this post.)
- A friend tweeted that it'd be funny if there were a Java port of Hakyll called Jyde. On the spot, I decided that the Perl 6 port should be called Psyde. So that's what it'll be called.
In summary: yay, new blog! Watch this space.