The Making of This Website

Almost nine years ago, I decided to write my own website generator. Static-site generators (SSGs) were sort of new back then, and somewhat fascinating to me. After failing to start a website/blog for a decade, I realized that I’ll never be satisfied by a ready-made solution, and I need to make something of my own. I started with Hakyll, a small SSG framework written in Haskell. Over years, I expanded my website by adding new sections and features. The website code has grown from 500 lines to over 17000 lines now. This note recalls the story of the same. The Hakyll Era# Some time in September 2017, I started with the 483 lines of example code Hakyll comes with. I liked Haskell and Hakyll was pretty easy to get started with because of ample examples and tutorials. It worked as expected for making a small blog-like website. All was good. Over the next couple of years, I started adding non-blog like features to the website. I added the Activities and Readings pages, and support for…