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), 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, don't look).
A few things to share to anyone who's thinking of doing the same:
before you do, keep in mind it worked for me because
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
gist for syntax highlighting of code, and let Github host and render
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
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!
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 \vert for pipes; \star 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.html
feed.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' rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'>
For some reason, to sign up with Feedly, I have to enter https://lrthomps.github.io/posts.html to be found (not feed.xml).
My Jekyll configuration is bare bones. By all means, copy as much as you like!
tags: otherHosted on Github Pages