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authorDavid Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>2016-04-24 15:26:44 -0400
committerDavid Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>2016-04-24 15:26:44 -0400
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+<title>Haunt Reference Manual: Introduction</title>
+
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+<a name="Introduction"></a>
+<div class="header">
+<p>
+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> &nbsp; [<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>
+</div>
+<hr>
+<a name="Introduction-1"></a>
+<h2 class="chapter">1 Introduction</h2>
+
+<p>Haunt is a hackable static site generator written in Guile Scheme. A
+static site generator assists an author with generating the HTML pages
+that they publish on the web. Unlike &ldquo;content management systems&rdquo;
+such as Wordpress or Drupal, static site generators are not dynamic
+web applications (complete with a relational database) that build
+pages on-the-fly. Instead, web pages are built in advance, on the
+author&rsquo;s computer, and copied to a web server when it is time to
+publish changes. The consequence of this design is that the web
+server no longer needs to run a complex, potentially insecure web
+application that connects to a database to retrieve data. Static
+files can be served easily by any generic web server. Since there is
+no web application or database server to deal with, static websites
+are easier to maintain, more secure, and resistant to high web traffic
+(&ldquo;slashdotting.&rdquo;) Furthermore, the entire website is stored in
+plain text, which allows the files to be version-controlled rather
+than kept in a relational database with no concept of history that
+needs to be backed up regularly.
+</p>
+<p>At the time that Haunt was conceived, there existed literally hundreds
+of other static site generators. Why add another one? Haunt
+differentiates itself from most other static site generators in that
+it aspires to the Emacs philosophy of &ldquo;practical software freedom.&rdquo;
+Not only is the source code available under a Free Software license,
+as most static site generators are, it is designed to be easily hacked
+and extended without altering the core source code. Haunt
+purposefully blurs the line between document and program, author and
+programmer, by embracing the notion of data as code. A Haunt-based
+website is not simply data, but a computer program. This design
+strategy encourages authors to automate repetitive tasks and empowers
+them to extend the software with their own ideas.
+</p>
+<p>To make such a system work well, a general-purpose, extensible
+programming language is needed. A traditional configuration file
+format simply will not do. The programming language that we feel is
+best suited to this task is Scheme, a clean and elegant dialect of
+Lisp. We believe that by giving authors the full expressive power of
+Scheme, they will be able to produce better websites and make better
+use of their time than with less programmable systems and less capable
+programming languages. Authors should feel empowered to hack the
+system to make it do what they want rather than what some programmer
+decided they should want. And perhaps most importantly, building
+websites with Haunt should be <em>fun</em>.
+</p>
+<p>Websites written in Haunt are described as purely functional programs
+that accept &ldquo;posts&rdquo;, text documents containing arbitrary metadata,
+as input and transform them into complete HTML pages using Scheme
+procedures. Haunt has no opinion about what markup language authors
+should use to write their posts and will happily work with any format
+for which a &ldquo;reader&rdquo; procedure exists. Likewise, Haunt also has no
+opinion about how authors should structure their sites, but has sane
+defaults. Currently, there exist helpful &ldquo;builder&rdquo; procedures that
+do common tasks such as generating a blog or Atom feed. While the
+built-in features may be enough for some, they surely will not be
+enough for all. Haunt&rsquo;s Scheme API empowers authors to easily tweak
+existing components, write replacements, or add entirely new features
+that do things no else has thought to do yet.
+</p>
+<p>Happy haunting!
+</p>
+<hr>
+<div class="header">
+<p>
+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> &nbsp; [<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>
+</div>
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+</html>