Source code for this blog

Contents

• Branches
• Draft posts
• Continuous build
• Browsers
• Publishing a post
• Guardrails

This site is built with Hakyll. I’ve had a great experience with that so far! It uses Haskell to generate a static HTML + CSS site, and doesn’t require the user to enable JS. Here I’ll do a quick overview of how I manage it in case you want to try something similar. Most of it is based on this tutorial, but I switched to self-hosting on a VPS rather than via Github Pages.

Update: 3.5 years later, I would do it the same way again if starting over. Added some details on my current workflow.

Branches

The master branch holds the production source code. I make a new branch like cssfixes or newidea when starting any task that has a chance of failing, then merge back into master once I know it works. I tried a branch per post, but it quickly became unwieldy. Now all my draft posts live on one drafts branch.

Draft posts

Each post is a folder with an index.md like this and possibly some other files too: drawings, standalone scripts, etc. The post should contain links and instructions whenever you can do something non-obvious with the other files. I mainly write in Pandoc markdown, but you can use anything supported by Pandoc. Posting dates are based on the folder structure, and the rest is pulled from the markdown header.

I date draft posts 2099/XX/XX, which pushes them to the top of the recent posts list and reminds me to fill in the actual posting date later. I tend to group them by topic too. For example 2099/01/* might be about Haskell and 2099/02/* about prediction markets.

Continuous build

To write I checkout the drafts branch, rebase -Xtheirs master if needed, and run build.sh. It builds a local copy of the site, serves it at http://localhost:8000, and auto-updates it as I change things. The tag cloud, RSS feed, CSS, and recent posts list auto-update along with the post contents. The only thing that doesn’t auto-update is the Haskell code; if I edit that I have to kill and re-run the script.

Browsers

I use the Tab Reloader plugin in both FireFox and Chrome, and set it to reload every 10 seconds while writing.

One other gotcha is that I have to disable caching (Developer Tools → Network → “Disable cache”) in each browser to make sure I’m not looking at old versions of the CSS. Chrome sometimes does it anyway and needs to have its history cleared.

Publishing a post

I save the drafts often, naming commits by the post(s) they edit. Then when a post is done I:

• git mv the 2099/XX/XX date folder to the current date
• Check it out onto master
• Commit and push master, leaving a clean git repo
• Run build.sh again, which creates the .site folder
• Run publish.sh in another terminal to rsync it to the server
• Checkout drafts again and git rebase -Xtheirs master

Guardrails

To ensure that I don’t accidentally publish drafts before they’re ready, I have a pre-push hook as suggested here:

# .git/hooks/pre-push
url="$2"
if [[ `grep 'draft'`&& "$url" =~ github ]]; then
  echo "Don't push the drafts branch to github! Aborting."
  exit 1
fi

I also remove them in publish.sh and .gitignore:

# publish.sh
# Just in case, remove accidentally-added draft posts before publishing
rm -rf .site/posts/2099

# .gitignore
# Ignore draft posts
# (This should be commented out of .gitinore on the drafts branch)
src/posts/2099