138 lines
6.9 KiB
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138 lines
6.9 KiB
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<title>Haunt Reference Manual: Introduction</title>
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<a name="Introduction"></a>
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<div class="header">
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<p>
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Next: <a href="Installation.html#Installation" accesskey="n" rel="next">Installation</a>, Previous: <a href="index.html#Top" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Top</a>, Up: <a href="index.html#Top" accesskey="u" rel="up">Top</a> [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="Concept-Index.html#Concept-Index" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p>
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<hr>
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<a name="Introduction-1"></a>
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<h2 class="chapter">1 Introduction</h2>
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<p>Haunt is a hackable static site generator written in Guile Scheme. A
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static site generator assists an author with generating the HTML pages
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that they publish on the web. Unlike “content management systems”
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such as Wordpress or Drupal, static site generators are not dynamic
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web applications (complete with a relational database) that build
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pages on-the-fly. Instead, web pages are built in advance, on the
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author’s computer, and copied to a web server when it is time to
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publish changes. The consequence of this design is that the web
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server no longer needs to run a complex, potentially insecure web
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application that connects to a database to retrieve data. Static
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files can be served easily by any generic web server. Since there is
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no web application or database server to deal with, static websites
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are easier to maintain, more secure, and resistant to high web traffic
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(“slashdotting.”) Furthermore, the entire website is stored in
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plain text, which allows the files to be version-controlled rather
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than kept in a relational database with no concept of history that
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needs to be backed up regularly.
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</p>
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<p>At the time that Haunt was conceived, there existed literally hundreds
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of other static site generators. Why add another one? Haunt
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differentiates itself from most other static site generators in that
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it aspires to the Emacs philosophy of “practical software freedom.”
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Not only is the source code available under a Free Software license,
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as most static site generators are, it is designed to be easily hacked
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and extended without altering the core source code. Haunt
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purposefully blurs the line between document and program, author and
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programmer, by embracing the notion of data as code. A Haunt-based
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website is not simply data, but a computer program. This design
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strategy encourages authors to automate repetitive tasks and empowers
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them to extend the software with their own ideas.
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</p>
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<p>To make such a system work well, a general-purpose, extensible
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programming language is needed. A traditional configuration file
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format simply will not do. The programming language that we feel is
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best suited to this task is Scheme, a clean and elegant dialect of
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Lisp. We believe that by giving authors the full expressive power of
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Scheme, they will be able to produce better websites and make better
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use of their time than with less programmable systems and less capable
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programming languages. Authors should feel empowered to hack the
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system to make it do what they want rather than what some programmer
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decided they should want. And perhaps most importantly, building
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websites with Haunt should be <em>fun</em>.
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</p>
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<p>Websites written in Haunt are described as purely functional programs
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that accept “posts”, text documents containing arbitrary metadata,
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as input and transform them into complete HTML pages using Scheme
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procedures. Haunt has no opinion about what markup language authors
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should use to write their posts and will happily work with any format
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for which a “reader” procedure exists. Likewise, Haunt also has no
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opinion about how authors should structure their sites, but has sane
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defaults. Currently, there exist helpful “builder” procedures that
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do common tasks such as generating a blog or Atom feed. While the
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built-in features may be enough for some, they surely will not be
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enough for all. Haunt’s Scheme API empowers authors to easily tweak
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existing components, write replacements, or add entirely new features
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that do things no else has thought to do yet.
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</p>
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<p>Happy haunting!
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</p>
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<hr>
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<div class="header">
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<p>
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Next: <a href="Installation.html#Installation" accesskey="n" rel="next">Installation</a>, Previous: <a href="index.html#Top" accesskey="p" rel="prev">Top</a>, Up: <a href="index.html#Top" accesskey="u" rel="up">Top</a> [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="Concept-Index.html#Concept-Index" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p>
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