---
title: Hello, world
---

It's about time I had a blog/journal/mental dumping ground again, and
getting this set up was a nice little exercise in system
administration and a little bit of Haskell coding.

I mention system administration because this is running on a system
with a version of Debian Linux installed that has been continuously
upgraded since around 2001. It was both slightly broken and very
crufty, but I was able to get plenty of space cleared and get
everything up-to-date with few issues.

And I mention Haskell because I'm using two Haskell programs as part
of the infrastructure of this site. One is the site engine itself,
[Hakyll][1]. It's a customizable build tool that translates from
various markup formats to HTML, then assembles all the site's pieces
together.

The second Haskell program I'm using the the [Clay][2] CSS generator,
which lets me build the CSS rules in a Haskell program in a CSS-like
DSL. A short program generates both a flexible semantic grid layout
and a baseline grid for managing the vertical rhythm of the text. I am
not a master page designer by any means, but I'm happy with the
result.

I will share more details about these tools, along with other things
I've been working on, in entries to follow.

[1]: http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ "Hakyll's Home Page"
[2]: http://fvisser.nl/clay/ "Clay's Home Page"