eamsden / happstack-blog

A simple blog extension for Happstack

A Happstack Blog Engine

I've written a simple blog engine to tie into my personal site, which uses Happstack. The blog engine uses Happstack, along with the markdown Haskell library to render posts from Markdown, and the cassava library for parsing a CSV database of posts. I'm also working on adding RSS feed support, but the available Haskell libraries for this are a bit more tricky.

Using:

Serving just a blog:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Happstack.Blog
import Happstack.Lite

main :: IO ()
main = serve (Just $ defaultServerConfig { port = 8080 }) $ blog "Tea and Time" "blog"

Serving a blog as a subdirectory:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Happstack.Blog
import Happstack.Lite

main :: IO ()
main = serve (Just $ defaultServerConfig { port = 8080 }) site

site :: ServerPart Response
site = msum [ dir "blog" $ blog "Tea and Time" "blog", ok $ toResponse "I'm OK"] 

In both these cases, the file entries.csv should appear in the subdirectory "blog" of the working directory of the server. The format of entries.csv is:

"Post title 1","2015-01-05 13:01:00","post-title-1"
"I like cats","2015-01-05 14:02:00","i-like-cats

The first field is the title of the post, the second is its timestamp, and the third is both the url slug and the name of the markdown file, minus the .md. So assuming that post-title-1.md is in the blog subdirectory along with the entries.csv file, the post should be shown at <blog-url>/post-title-1.

Architecture

Currently the blog engine is a single module which exports a single function. When tied into Happstack, the blog function will read the "entries.csv" file in the given directory. Each row is a post. The first column is titles, the second is post dates, and the third is names. The name is used both as the filename for the post content (in the same directory as entries.csv, and with the .md extension added to the name). blog also takes the blog title as a parameter.

Still To Do

Currently I'm working on:

• RSS feeds