Moving from Octopress to Hakyll

Octopress had served my need of statically generating my blog very well for a while. As a pioneer in static website (especially blog) generator, it did pretty well. Only two things that I don’t really like, where they are Jekyll’s lack of support in MathJax and slowness of Matz ruby. It usually takes me tens of seconds to build the whole site with the article number between ten to twenty. Therefore I am looking for alternatives that could cover the same feature set and with better build speed. I considered DocPad and Hakyll as two alternative candidates. DocPad has rich features and sizable community and definitely a good option. But just as I grow more sophiscated in Haskell, using a good software based on Haskell is temptative. I could learn more and hack around it.

With hakyll as the generator, I chose Casper as my blog theme. It is the default theme for Ghost, and licensed under MIT. Spending some time to read the existing sharing about using Hakyll, I managed to piece different components together. As I get more proficiency in Hakyll, it could be possibly released as a boilerplate template, or could be considered as a Hakyll-version of Octopress. I really love this combination of toolchains, hope I could blog more with them.