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This first post will be a bit of a look into the technical side of how I set all of this (my site) up. Welcome to here; hopefully the content herein is at least interesting if not useful.

Backstory

I acquired the domain mivehind.net earlier this year. The name was not born of my imagination; rather, it comes from one of my friends. With their permission, I am using it as my own.

I purchased the domain through Gandi SAS, a French company that handles both domain registration and web hosting. (A special thanks to my bank for flagging this purchase and not my sudden purchases in Las Vegas. Way to go, guys.) They are committed to privacy and open source, both topics about which I care deeply. Plus, it was cheap.

Paying other people to run computer systems has never been my thing, though. Checking the IP mivehind.net resolves to will reveal that it is in the 128.237 block, denoting Carnegie Mellon University. I’m currently an undergraduate there, but more importantly the machine sits in a machine room that we, the Computer Club, run. I’m using a CMS that is still under heavy development, so having full access to my machines is important. More on that presently.

Software Decisions

CClub is predominantly Debian GNU/Linux, which is good because I like Debian. We also use Xen as our hypervisor. A brief comment about Xen: it and paravirtualization in general are excellent and fast, but expect Xen to be the subject of future less-than-happy posts on here.

Once I purchased a domain, though, I was slow to do anything with it. Mostly that’s because I hate developing for the web; my ideal design is a terminal with an emacs window open. To be fair, though, I’m also fairly anti-the modern web (there is another term for the modern web which I will not utter here), in particular ECMAScript and Flash. But then, I also use ifconfig and System V init scripts, so maybe the same principle applies here.

Two things I do like, though, are Haskell and version control. As a result, I was pointed to Gitit, which is a wiki backed by DVCS (git, darcs, or mercurial, at the moment); it also allows input in LaTeX, which is also something I like. I haven’t found a use for a wiki yet, but I’m still looking. Once I understood the concept, I noticed that gitit uses the Happstack web framework. And as one might expect, the ‘H’ on the beginning of that name does indeed indicate that it’s Haskell software; specifically, a web stack. So suddenly I’m interested in my website again.

As it happens, I’m not using Happstack directly, though I do rely on it. Instead, I’m using clckwrks, which is a Haskell CMS that uses Happstack as a backend. It lets me write pages in Markdown (okay, it’s not entirely Markdown, but I’ll get to that momentarily), and handles syntax highlighting and even allows for media management. It’s still in its early stages, though; knowing Haskell is somewhat of a must for successful deployment.

A Few Words about Markdown

One can read the full definition for Markdown on the very helpful Wikipedia page, although Wikipedia currently notes that

This article is written like a manual or guidebook. Please help rewrite this article from a descriptive, neutral point of view, and remove advice or instruction. (May 2010).

Thanks, Wikipedia. In any case, I’d like to draw attention to the Code and Blockquotes section of the language definition. Clckwrks gets them backward; or rather, more accurately, hscolour gets them backward, and at the moment hscolour is being used for syntax highlighting. Following discussion with the authors on #happs, I have learned that the developers are aware of this problem (good), and plan to switch to pandoc soon (even better). I’m told there are other reasons as well, but this seems like a good one to me, especially since prefixing code with ‘>’ increases strongly the difficulty of copy-pasting it.

Creating the -stack

I’ll assume as the base a fresh, minimal install of Debian Wheezy (the current stable release). A Wheezy install means ghcv7.4.1, which is new but not bleeding edge. These instructions are based off of those found on the clckwrks website which are themselves quite good.

Talk to aptitude

From a fresh install, we first grab the things we absolutely need:

$ aptitude install cabal-install darcs make unzip markdown
$ aptitude install lib{crypto++,ssl}-dev # for HsOpenSSL
$ aptitude install happy # for haskell-src-exts
$ aptitude install libncurses{,w}5-dev # for terminfo

enable the extra functionality we’d like to have:

$ aptitude install libmagic-dev libgd2-xpm-dev libexpat1-dev # for media
$ aptitude install hscolour # for code markup; note the spelling

Talk about clckwrks

The first thing to do is get a fresh copy of the clckwrks source code. The developers have plans for the editing process to become more streamlined and friendly to non-Haskellers, but for the moment there is only the bleeding edge, so to speak.

$ darcs get http://hub.darcs.net/stepcut/clckwrks

The instructions on the clckwrks website I linked above are quite good; I followed them entirely for the remainder of the setup, and would recommend that those reading this do the same.

Talking about cabal

cabal is Haskell’s package manager of sorts. A more accurate description is to say that it is a build manager, since it has no notion of uninstall. Rather, uninstallation is accomplished through a combination of ghc-pkg unregister and judicious use of rm. I will ascribe it the adjective “touchy”, and say no more on that front.

On Darcs, Git, and Github

Most (sane) users don’t have darcs installed. In the version control world, it looks like git has come out ahead. There is a Github repository clckwrks/clckwrks.git which purports to be the “Official mirror of clckwrks darcs repo”. It may therefore be tempting to grab source from there instead of from the darcs. Unfortunately, while official it may be; up to date it is not. It was exactly a year behind on commits as of this writing. I determined this the hard way. I’m told this is the fault of darcs-bridge.

I actually do prefer Darcs’s model of the world (it tracks patches as its basic object). My first version control was Subversion, which I actually liked (though I’m told this is because I never had to resolve any merges with it or do serious branch management), and Mercurial felt to me like a natural extension of Subversion into the DVCS world. I found Git to be extremely unintuitive when learning it, though I can understand the appeal of sacrificing usability in order to gain speed.

Results

The result of the above (and more web development than I would have liked (ever seen this bug report?) is this site. It’s not flashy, but then I didn’t want flashy. What few design decisions I have made were optimized for my own ease of use, and I appreciate feedback on both them and the content herein.