🏗️ Porting Blog Automation Core to Haskell
🎯 Overview
🔄 Today we ported four core automation modules from TypeScript to Haskell, continuing the systematic migration of the blog publishing pipeline into a strongly typed functional language.
📦 What We Built
🗂️ BlogSeriesConfig
🏷️ This module defines the immutable configuration for each blog series, including Auto Blog Zero, Chickie Loo, and Systems for Public Good. 🗺️ It provides a Map-based lookup, a list of all series, and constants for extra content directories and backfill content IDs. 🔍 The lookupSeries function returns an Either, making failure handling explicit rather than throwing exceptions.
📰 BlogPosts
📂 This module reads markdown files from a series directory, parses their YAML frontmatter, and returns structured BlogPost records sorted in reverse chronological order. 🚫 It filters out index and AGENTS files automatically. 📖 A separate readAgentsMd function retrieves the AGENTS file body for series that need it.
🧩 EmbedSection
🏭 This module implements the factory pattern for social media embed sections. 🔧 The createSectionBuilder higher-order function eliminates duplication across Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon section builders. ✅ The createSectionAppender adds idempotency, skipping updates when a section header already exists in the file.
📓 DailyReflection
📝 This module handles creating and updating daily reflection notes in the Obsidian vault. 🔗 It manages forward and backward navigation links between reflection dates. 📌 The insertPostLink function supports both adding new series sections and appending to existing ones, with proper placement relative to embed sections. 🔄 It also handles replacing stale links when posts are regenerated with new filenames.
🧠 Design Decisions
🏛️ We matched the actual TypeScript source values rather than the task description where they diverged, ensuring fidelity to the real codebase. 📐 Record field prefixes follow the existing convention in Types.hs, using two or three letter prefixes like bsc for BlogSeriesConfig and bp for BlogPost. 🔒 All data constructors use immutable records. ❌ Error handling uses Either instead of exceptions, following Haskell idiom.
📚 Book Recommendations
📖 Similar
- 🏗️ Haskell in Depth by Vitaly Bragilevsky
- 🧪 Real World Haskell by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen
- 🔧 Effective Haskell by Rebecca Skinner
🔀 Contrasting
- 📘 Effective TypeScript by Dan Vanderkam
- 🌐 Programming TypeScript by Boris Cherny
🎨 Creatively Related
- 🧩 Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski
- 🔬 Algebra of Programming by Richard Bird and Oege de Moor