Rebuilding the web site

I am completely rebuilding my web site from scratch. The previous one was becoming hopelessly out of date due to lack of updates. I also decided its structure didn’t satisfy what I wanted from my personal web site.

There were two problems with the previous web site that I want to deal with:

  • It was structured more like a blog instead of a more general web site. While this was fine in its early days when I regularly posted updates, it no longer serves my purpose given how infrequently I write posts. I want the new web site to be more informational instead of an online diary.

  • An even bigger problem is that I am unwilling and unable to spend the time to maintain the Drupal installation serving the previous web site. I used to be very hands-on with software maintenance a long time ago, but I no longer have the time nor willingness to keep software up to date manually. This is a big problem because security vulnerabilities have been left unpatched, and I really need to do something about them.

I am rebuilding the new site using Hakyll. It is a static site generator, which means I would not have to regularly update software in a server to keep it free from security vulnerabilities. I’m also a fan of Haskell, and Hakyll is written in Haskell, so this seemed to be a good opportunity to use Haskell for something I use. It also means it would be a lot easier to extend the site to support various things I would like it to include.

I’m even using this as an opportunity to use a Haskell-based CSS preprocessor, Clay. This also means that the style is exteremly minimal, since I don’t have the experience or time to create beautiful styles for web sites. Surprisingly, I’m prety happy with the minimal look; I might keep it the way it is now, or I might change it little by little until it is a lot more polished.