Building the M-x Erlangen Website

by Merlin and Melanie on January 30, 2020 18:30 in room 0.131 at Cauerstraße 11

tl;dr: How we built the M-x Erlangen website using Hakyll and org-mode
Slides (auto generated)

Meetup

Problems

$5 per month
Users regularly join but then don’t attend
Spam accounts

Benefits

Email list
Good discoverability
Advertising
Payment & Sponsoring support
Attendance count

GitLab Pages

Static Website Hosting for Free

It’s free
No security or privacy concerns
Easy to maintain
(even allows for custom domains)

Continuous Deployment

each commit triggers automatic rebuild and deployment
mail notifications on build (or test) failures
based largely on (but not limited to) Docker
distributed runners

Quick Demo

Static Site Generators

Org-mode

awesome source language
allows HTML export
assigns a few semantic css classes
cumbersome to customize

Jekyll

uses markdown with liquid templates
configured via options in file or via args
special support for blogging

Hakyll

uses pandoc and pandoc templates
configured via custom Haskell executable
extremely flexible

Quick Demo

Pandoc

universal document converter
handles a shitton of input file types

Markdown, Org, LaTeX, docx, odt, DokuWiki, epub, …
own templating system

UI Stuff?

Templates and Partials

Templates: Organize UI in html, write entries in org-mode
Partials: split UI into smaller pieces

Context Matters

$title$ , $date$ , and $body$ change accordingly depending on its context.

Load and Apply Templates

Lessons Learned

Automatically filtering future and past talks is annoying

Hakyll is a static site generator and the filtering is done only when generating.

Can be worked around with scheduled rebuilds.

Stack and CI don’t play nicely

Stack in Docker took waaay too long to build too much of the Haskell ecosystem.
Can be worked around by CI caching.
We switched to raw nix for CI (without Docker) as we both use NixOS anyway.

Future of M-x Erlangen

This is the last meetup (on meetup.com)
Matrix chat (bridged to other services) Maybe we remove the bridge at some point as it keeps messing with the channel.
Mailing list
Website for history and content