Work hard, boy, and you'll find,
One day you'll have
A blog like mine, blog like mine,
A blog like mine.
– Cat Stevens [Paraphrased]

Over the years many people have asked me to share with them how I developed this website, seeing as it has a variety of very nice features including:

• Embedded LaTeX math actually rendered with LaTeX and embedded in the document. This means I can use LaTeX packages like tikz and xypic for diagrams, as well as well typeset formulas inline with other text with baseline correction. An obligatory demonstration: For inline math, , and for display math:

  

• Literate Agda support, such as in this article, with semantic highlighting and hyperlinked jump-to-definition, even for the standard library imports.

• Citeproc based bibliography support, which reads BibTeX databases. Most of my technical articles make use of this, for example this article, and the article linked above.

• Atom-based feed support (see the little button at the top right)

• Syntax highlighting for most other languages, such as Haskell, visible in the same article linked above.

Up until recently, I was very reluctant to share the code for this website, because, among other things:

• LaTeX rendering was accomplished through the use of an ancient, barely working piece of C code I cribbed from the GladTeX installation. It was very system dependent - it required latex, dvips and gs to be in exactly the right places to work correctly. The formulae were then embedded in the HTML document by postprocessing the output of Pandoc with tagsoup, and detecting any equations in a very ad-hoc way. They were cached using a liberal mix of unsafePerformIO and hacks, which barely worked and typically caused problems if the LaTeX failed to compile.

• The bibliography support relied on a hacky workaround I had written to provide Binary instances for an unexposed part of pandoc-citeproc.

• The site would mysteriously corrupt its own Hakyll cache for no reason.

• The Literate Agda compiler was hardcoded against an old version of Agda and was pretty unmaintainable.

However I am pleased to announce that now I have cleaned up all of these problems. The LaTeX rendering has been completely rewritten in Haskell, and is more configurable and useful. It's provided in my latex-formulae suite of packages, available on GitHub and Hackage under the following three packages:

• latex-formulae-image - Basic support for rendering LaTeX formulae to images using actual system LaTeX.

• latex-formulae-pandoc - Support for rendering LaTeX equations inside pandoc documents, and a standalone executable that can be used as a Pandoc filter.

• latex-formulae-hakyll - A Hakyll compiler that uses latex-formulae-pandoc, and adds some useful caching for Hakyll watch servers.

The Agda code has been cleaned up and packaged into two useful Hackage packages, also available on GitHub (EDIT: now deprecated as Agda can do this itself now):

• agda-snippets - Support for preprocessing any text document and replacing Agda code blocks with coloured, hyperlinked source in HTML. It leaves the rest of the text untouched, so it's possible to then read the output with Pandoc.

• agda-snippets-hakyll - Adds some basic mechanisms to integrate agda-snippets with Hakyll and Pandoc.

The bibliography workaround is no longer necessary, due to fixes in upstream libraries.

The other features (feeds, highlighting) are all just provided by Hakyll built-in. The source of this website itself is also available on GitHub.