Hello! Welcome to the new site. In this I will cover the changes we are undergoing currently.
What's New
Per my most recent post, I said I was going to start converting over my site from Zola to Haunt. I had a lot of hesitation in doing this since it would involve a very non-trivial amount of effort. Zola's posts are formatted with a hybrid of TOML and Markdown, while Haunt supports other types of formats but can also support CommonMark.
Changing the format for posts to be stored meant a lot of changes to individual files. I have been writing posts for five years, so this wasn't an easy thing to motivate myself to do. As I started, I realized instead of trying to support all my posts over the course of five years, I should take the time to trim the fat: get rid of things I wasn't totally happy with.
In turn, a lot of my older posts are going in the dumpster. There were many posts I wasn't totally satisfied with; information no longer relevant, code no longer supported, or projects I was not working on. Many dead-end projects I had ended up spanning multiple posts, and I felt it not totally right to hold onto pages for things no longer actively in use.
I am a fan of my work on deep-dive projects like my work exploring [MyHouse.wad](), or write-ups on hardware like my efforts on my [data vault](). I am proud of those quite a bit. I didn't care for my monthly updates anymore, as I no longer follow any strict schedule system for this website. It didn't feel right to do a lot of labor for posts I am no longer happy with.
Reasons for Haunt
Haunt I had known about for a while, but felt it was too early to consider seriously using it. Haunt even slightly resembles what I eventually derived on my own in Racket in an older project I no longer use! I felt slight enticement to join the Haunt users out there because some things started to make sense in my head.
- Instead of templates being literal HTML files with substitute insertion points, templates are simply Scheme expression trees
- Incorrect template structure can now be verified by the Guile runtime itself, instead of needing a template parser to first read a file and attempt to parse it into a template tree
- Standard library functions for the template system is simply Guile itself, you can do a lot more when you don't need a template engine to define a standard library for you
- The template format itself is not likely to change; Lisp syntax hasn't changed in decades
- Being able to control the builder functions for your site to dictate what actions will get performed, quite a bit like Makefiles, but again, validated by the Guile runtime for a small layer of correctness
I had a lot of shared ideas while working on my own implementation with Racket, but eventually dropped it due to the amount of time required. Knowing Haunt has some similar traits, I'm more than happy to start using Haunt and restart my website.
What's Next
It's going to take a lot of time for me to properly implement all the things this website needs for me to be happy. I am using a basic CSS definition for now, but it is going to need some improvements slowly. My posts I am keeping are all here, and posts I no longer want are technically gone. Then, once things settle down, I will migrate my entire homelab over to the new server, which I still have not totally finished yet.
Huge shout-out to Dave Thompson for creating Haunt and basically acting as my source material for my change-over to Haunt. Excited to start tweaking it to my own custom design and implement some new ideas using Haunt as the basis. There may be some growing pains for a bit here, but I feel it's what I need to get creative again.