Site Generation with Loom - 2025/06/03

I've redone my site with a new site generator: loom. It's a static site generator written in a single Haskell file. It's basically just a copy of node, minus the markdown to HTML conversion. That and it being in Haskell instead of C I suppose.

To be honest I don’t think the switch was really necessary, but I do think that this more minimal approach is slightly better in that I don’t really find markdown nicer to write than raw HTML. Perhaps it’s slightly cleaner for lists and the like, but frankly I rarely remember how to format anything in markdown past headers, and it’s nice to have certainty about links to other parts of my own site working as intended. Not to mention that I just like writing Haskell and using tools I made myself is one of life’s great pleasures.

If I am feeling motivated at some point I will probably add more checks and safety features to loom, since I think it would be nice to have warnings about absolute paths to files that don’t exist and that sort of thing. Dumb checks to help you when you drop a stitch basically. But in general I think I will only really add things when I find I want them for my own site, or when I find things that break. Lazy load complexity, that’s the mantra. For now the basic goal of a nice navbar, and consistent styling with understandable semantics seems to have been met. That and having another little thing to put on my git host.