Since I just started paternity leave I have a chance to get back into some hobby projects.
This blog/homepage/scratchpad will be my first (of many hopefully). Having mainly a long list of projects I thought I would start with a short blog post about how I got this site up and running.
First thing was getting a Linux box up and running. I got too frustrated messing around with Emacs and haskell mode on my Mac during my last stint with Haskell and Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!. So I decided to have a go at it running more cleanly on a Linux machine. Luckily my wife had an “old” Dell Studio 1558 lying around that she had replaced with a new mac book pro. Sadly it was sorely in need of a good dust off. Fustratingly cleaning out the fan requires taking apart the entire laptop. Thankfully a bit of googling provided this great guide and then it was just a couple hours with a screwdriver to take everything apart blow some compressed air through the cooling unit and put everything back together again.
With a machine all set I just needed to decide on a Linux distribution to roll with. I ended up going with the MATE version of Linux Mint. MATE due to its apperent ease of use with XMonad which I have been wanting to have a go at and its no frills approach also appeals to me. Linux Mint was chosen due to my previous positive experience with Ubuntu and wanting to get up and running fast.
After a successfull install of Linux Mint 17.1 I went ahead and attempted a quick install of Hakyll. I went ahead and tried installing the Haskell Platform form the debian package which rolled in nicely. Then I jumped into the installation guide from the Hakyll website
$ cabal install hakyllResulted in a request to –forcereinstalls being somewhat weary of ending up in Cabal-Hell I decided to give it a run. Only to be face with a lovely series of Exit code 1 from installation of pandoc among others.
This is when I double checked what version of the Haskell Platform was in the debian package. It turns out that only version 2013.2 is present in the repositories. So I went ahead with a bit of apt-get remove magic to clean out the old Haskell Platform and went straight to the source for a nice binary tarball. After following the instructions I was up and running with version 2014.2.
Time for a second round of cabal install hakyll this time I got a bit deeper in only to be faced with a explosion of Exit code 1, cannot find -lz thankfully a bit of googling explained that cannot find -lz is piglatin for I am missing a lib32z1 dependency. The fix was (atleast to get cabal-install to compile) to install the development package with synaptic.
$ sudo apt-get install lib32z1-devA bit of a wait on compilation and I had a stellar installation of hakyll.
$ hakyll-init morten
hakyll-init: command not foundAlright so add $HOME/.cabal/bin to $PATH too .bash_profle? .profile? .bash_rc? After a bit of searching I hope I correctly understood that .bash_rc was the right place to add the below line code.
PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH"And Voilá the basic template for this site was born. Quick runs of ghc make and ./site build, ./site watch and the template was running on my localhost.
One of reasons for having a run at Emacs was to get access to the great open source tooling that the community has built for Emacs. I am used to working with a full fledged Visual Studio including ReSharper so I will probably have to fidle around with packages for a bit to get the same level of automation. haskell-mode seems like a great place to start. I attempt to install it using the debian package but it seemed to be broken. The installation instructions on the project website worked after adding the melpa repositories to my .emacs. Which was done by adding the below lines to my .emacs.
(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
("marmalade" . "https://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/")))Finally on to deploying the site! Thankfully my brother in law has a LAMP server up an running and was kind enough to set up a virtual host for me. So a simple rsync of the compiled site will work as version 0.1 of deployment. I will have to figure out how to get a smoother deployments later on. Perhaps using a github repository and a cron-job if I can get that working on his host.
So where to now? First I think I will brush up on my Emacs by redoing the built in tutorial and perhaps a getting started guide. I think I will try using Anki to get up to speed on shortcuts and maybe expand it to Haskell tidbits later on. After that it is on to defining the project of fleshing out the site!