Dog food with a distinct Raku flavor

Originally published on 29 September 2010 by Carl Mäsak.

For a long time, I kept using use Perl for my blogging, knowing that there are better solutions out there. blogs.perl.org being among the most alluring alternatives. Various Raku bloggers were also reporting happiness with Wordpress-based blogs. Inertia kept me tied to use Perl.

Inertia — and something else. I had a teeny tiny dream that I could make a blogging solution in Raku. That would, I theorized, make me ultimately happy.

Except that it would never happen. It’s quite a big step to move blogs, and doing it while actually inventing the new blog under oneself… no wai.

And then use Perl forced my hand. After ~10 years of service, it has now been shut down. And suddenly, I found myself without a blogging platform.

So I thought, what the heck.

A couple of weeks later, here I stand with a working blogging solution in Raku. Yay!

I’ll have a lot more to say about the blogging software as we go along, but here are the main points in bullet form:

• It’s written in Raku. (See above.)
• It’s currently 200 lines of Raku!
• It’s a static website generator. (If it weren’t for today’s speed limitations, it’d probably generate pages dynamically. There is, after all, a wiki engine that pulled that off already two years ago.)
• It outsources Markdown generation to Perl. This may or may not be a temporary solution.
• I’m not ready to put it on github yet, but here’s a snapshot of the source if you’re interested.
• There’s a static website generator called Hakyll on which I’m basing the general design of my program. Over time, I hope to push things out into what will eventually become a port of Hakyll. I want to do this while continually running the blog, to make sure things keep working. (Hence the title of this post.)
• A friend tweeted that it’d be funny if there were a Java port of Hakyll called Jyde. On the spot, I decided that the Raku port should be called Psyde. So that’s what it’ll be called.

In summary: yay, new blog! Watch this space.