frogging again

I’m pretty sure one of the main reasons programmers write blogs is using them as yet another excuse to tinker with their favourite languages and tools: i know one of them quite well.

The only way i would muster energy enough to produce a sequel to programming-musings was, i knew, finding a blog engine i could host and interact with in the manner Emacs has taught me to expect from any software tool worth its salt.

Tekuti was my first temptation, but i don’t really want to hack on the web server side of blogging, nor write my posts in HTML or stash them in a Git repo.

So i knew a static blog generator was my thing, and i also knew i wasn’t interested in those written in Python or Ruby, and for a while Hakyll sounded like the natural choice. After all, Haskell one of those languages i cherish, and Hakyll would let me write my posts within the comfy limits of Emacs using markdown¹.

And yet, when it comes to tinker with the environment as lively as possible, nothing beats a lispy language, and it was with unconcelaed glee that i received the discovery of a static site generator written in The Language Formerly Known As Scheme (which, as lisps go, is an excellent one): Greg Hendershott’s Frog.

With Frog i can not only edit my posts inside Emacs, where i already have a handful of home-brewed helpers on top of markdown-mode that i can grow as needed, but actually hack on the Racket implementation using Geiser, adapting it to my exact needs and, when they overlap with those of Greg and other Frog users, contribute back something useful.

What’s not to blog?