FAfa·Mar 26, 2015
I'm working through the admittedly beautiful and very thorough documentation [1].
It's a very simple idea, really: you write your document and sprinkle racket s-expressions wherever you want. You can put your definitions at the top of your document, or in another file. You describe your templates in Racket also, because like Butterick says in his RacketCon video [2], "S-expressions and XML are the same thing". You can use tags that you haven't defined, they just get placed in the resulting HTML.
You still have to roll your own CSS and any JavaScript. As far as I can tell it doesn't help you out with things like keeping track of footnotes numbering or citations and such: you roll your own for things like this, Pollen is no LaTeX. This is partly why I say it's a really simple system. It makes a certain set of web authoring things simple, bu
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t it doesn't try to be a one-stop shop, which is excellent because this makes it a supremely flexible tool.
It also has some backend fancy sauce where you can save your file and refresh the page [3]. Also I admit I'm not really a big fan of DrRacket: I've just been using it for the tutorials because I have no idea what to expect from Racket, but I'm slowly moving to Emacs, and Racket seems to work fine there.
Definitely worth checking out Pollen if only to get a light introduction to the thoroughness of Racket documentation (they definitely do things differently in Racket-land!), but stay for the tools you need to roll your own ultimate static blog generator.
(Also, completely unrelated: cool video and cool title at another RacketCon 2013 talk: "Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think!" [4].)
[1] http://pkg-build.racket-lang.org/doc/pollen/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20GGVNBykaw
[3] I've made a request for no-refresh updates: https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen/issues/35
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c