I had great intentions last summer to add more regular posts: more paper summaries, worked through ideas, etc. But [excuses]. Fast forward to now, I have notes to put up but have since switched entirely from a mac to Ubuntu, discovered a far better app to edit markdown with math, Typora (not freeware but so good I’ll pay once it’s out of beta [looking back in 2024: I did!]), and I couldn’t get the new post to render properly (some strange auto-scaling was happening).
After I wasted over nearly two days debugging Jekyll (cause stuff happened outside of my template files), I gave up. In a couple of hours, I was rid of Jekyll, rid of frameworks and down to raw html+css. Gotta say, html5 once you give in to it, is damn nice compared to circa 2004 wed development (my work is still live [still live in 2024], don’t look).
A few things to share to anyone who’s thinking of doing the same:
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before you do, keep in mind it worked for me because
- I know html+css but not Jekyll
- I don’t need a real blog (with feed, commenting, auto-generated file structure etc); though all I’m missing is the feed.xml file (except… see the next section)
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I copied code snippets from other sites, kept some css from the Jekyll minima theme, but my goal was to strip it back to the simplest it could be
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gist for syntax highlighting of code, and let Github host and render
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mathjax for latex math: I try to keep formulas from going too wide but if they must I choose to let them run over the page edge on small devices. It’s better than squinting at scaled down math
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colours: again, simple is best. Think of all the wonderful people that use a dark mode: does half your content disappear? It seems the majority of pages still have a white(ish) background, so I went with that too: it means the simplest dark modes that invert colours works for my site (e.g. Firefox iOS app).
My favourite find to convert a picture of myself that didn’t feel so […]: cartoonize project/paper + demo. It’s another style transfer GAN, predominantly trained on scenery images are collected from Shinkai Makoto, Miyazaki Hayao and Hosoda Mamoru films. The cityscapes are the best, especially those with clouds. I used a picture from the approach on Mount Rainier: love what it did to the rocks, grass, trees and background hills!
…and bringing Jekyll back
I considered getting the feed working manually, adding posts manually hereon, updating posts.html manually. But finally, I accepted the challenge of just getting Jekyll working after all. It was too much like installing a GPU for ML only — fighting against the grain — except in this case, why bother?
Main takeaways:
no theme is required: I kept fighting the theme, elements kept not looking like they should. Overall, I failed the theme. But! no theme required! I had all the layout files anyway. Lesson learned. No theme.
the theme I got rid of wanted assets in _assets but normal Jekyll wants them in assets
math: use for pipes; for complex conjugate. Otherwise, pipes are interpreted as part of a table and stars italicize
posts didn’t have to get buried in folder hell: specify the file structure in _config.yml:
permalink: /posts/:title.htmlfeed.xml doesn’t make it easy to sign up in the first place (though it does provide the actual feed): add to the header of the root layout
<link href='{{ "feed.xml" | relative_url }}' rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'>For some reason, to sign up with Feedly, I have to enter
https://lrthomps.github.io/posts.htmlto be found (notfeed.xml).
My Jekyll configuration is bare bones. By all means, copy as much as you like!