mohanzhang / music

Source code for www.mohanzhang.com/music

Hi! This is the code for the lyrics subsite that you'll find at www.mohanzhang.com/music. It's compiled by hakyll, and relies on ruby's bundler to install haml and sass on the commandline.

Installation

There is a .ruby-version file provided to set the ruby version. Make sure bundler is installed, then bundle install to get haml and sass on the commandline.

Hakyll itself is installed with stack. Do stack install to put the site executable on your path. This then lets you run stack exec ./preview to start the executable watching your source files. The site will then be available on http://localhost:8000.

Background

I've released two albums so far, both self-produced. The first one, The Every Mile Made Yours EP, was released in December of 2013 and was the product of a self-imposed 60-day limit. As you can imagine, for a first-time effort given only 60 days, the result was merely... ok.

Half a year after I released my first EP, I set out to do a self-produced album that I could be more satisfied with, and so I started writing for Western Hearts Pacific Skies EP. I originally budgeted four months to get it done (twice as long as the first one), but getting a good enough result that I could be happy with actually took over 15 months. Work and life obviously affected that timeline since my original 60 days were unemployed and worry-free living at home.

You can read more about the first EP on my blog. I'll eventually write about the making of the second EP as well.