Transitioning to Haunt

Rather than study for finals this week, I spent my time moving this blog over to Haunt. Previously, I was using Hugo, and while ox-hugo made the authoring workflow tolerable, doing anything on the rendering side of things was unsavory at best. I eventually had enough and decided to look for another solution, of which Haunt was the most enticing.

I should probably begin by thanking David Thompson, not only for his work on Haunt, but also because he made the source code for his Haunt blog available. I'm sure our similar stylesheets is enough of a hint that I used his blog as a starting point. In hopes that it may be useful to someone else, I have also chosen to make my Haunt configuration and Org sources available here.

On the topic of Org sources, my chief concern with transitioning away from Hugo was the possibility of losing my ability to author posts in org-mode. After all, "Org" is not among the available readers in the upstream Haunt repository. I handled this by taking the same approach as ox-hugo: writing an Org Export backend. I call it ox-haunt, and it really doesn't do much. It piggybacks on ox-html and Haunt's html-reader, filling in the metadata section according to whatever Org keywords it finds. I've also tried to keep it relatively unopinionated, leaving the output of ox-html generally unaltered – if you don't like the gross old-school XHTML, set org-html-doctype. Do note, though, that xml->sxml can't read implicitly self-closing tags like img. So make sure you set it to "xhtml5" and not "html5".

If you do end up using ox-haunt, you'll need to use a slightly modified html-reader for versions <= 0.2.4:

(define (read-html-post port)
  (values (read-metadata-headers port)
          (let loop ((ret '()))
            (catch 'parser-error
              (lambda ()
                (match (xml->sxml port)
                  (('*TOP* sxml) (loop (cons sxml ret)))))
              (lambda (key . parameters)
                (reverse ret))))))

(define html-reader
  (make-reader (make-file-extension-matcher "html")
               (cut call-with-input-file <> read-html-post)))

The html-reader included in those versions can't read more than one top-level element. I've submitted a patch, but as of the time of writing this, it hasn't made its way into the upstream repository.

Also, see that beautiful syntax highlighting? One of the benefits of using ox-html as a base was htmlize. I've even been able to tailor the colors to my Emacs theme.

Oh, one last point. I've dropped the header images for my posts. I was using them in hopes of emulating the look of Dolphin Emulator's blog and aixxe, but I really don't think I was able to do the technique justice.

Overall, I'm happy with that choice of static site generator. Compared with Hugo, Haunt is far simpler and easier to hack on. Honestly, who cares if I'm using the "world's fastest framework for building websites"? haunt build still finishes in under a second. And despite describing myself as a Common Lisp-er, I've been having a blast using Guile Scheme for this.