Blog Generator

This is a Haskell program that generates static-site blogs for you. Blogs are written in a slightly different version of markdown (explained below).

You should have a folder that you target, for example blog/

blog/
    coding-in-haskell/
        index.md
        config.toml
    my-thoughts-on-riscv/
        index.md
        config.toml
        riscv-logo.png

The two things that actually matter are that both these directories have a index.md and a config.toml. The index.md contains the article body, and the config.toml contains metadata about the article.

Running this program on the target blog/ will turn index.md into index.html and generate a blog home page pointing to all the different blogs. The config.toml should look something like this, but only top-level fields are required

title = "Test Article"
description = "A test article, nothing special"
date = 2025-03-09

[meta]
keywords = ["test", "article"]

[[author]]
name = "Leslie Lamport"

[[author]]
name = "Donald Knuth"

Markdown?

No. This is not markdown. It's pretty close though, and this is intentional. Most of the features of basic markdown are enabled and work as expected.

Features not Present

Soft paragraph breaks

If you want this, use <br> explicitly. So, instead of

Hi_there.__
Hi_there_on_a_newline.

Hi_there.<br>
Hi_there_on_a_newline.

Changes

Line breaks

Multiple newlines are actually counted. So for example

A


B

C

A, B and C have different amounts of spacing between them.

Rules for Italics, Bold etc.

* this * would be printed as italicised. This is intentional. One big difference then is that this:

blah: * this *hi*

Is no longer rendered like

blah: * this hi

But rather like this

blah: this hi*

Escapes

You can escape *, >, ! and $ whereever you like. Other characters cannot be escaped.