Hello World

Posted on 27th March 2015

I had a need to update and move my old academic website so thought I would take the plunge and host a site on GitHub. Here is an aide-memoire for myself as to how I did this:

• How to get a website for your GitHub project: Pages

This blog is built using Jekyll:

• How to use Jekyll with pages: Jekyll with pages
• Some Jekyll documentation to the same effect: Jekyll docs

Jekyll is what you might call a "template engine". If you have the sort of lack of time and artistic skills which I do, you'll need to find a template:

• Useful article: Smashing Magazine
• GitHub page associated with this: GitHub site
• Template this site uses: Hyde
• Markdown: GitHub cheatsheet
• Visual Design: VisualMess

You can use \(\LaTeX \), but remember to markup inline as \\(\frac{a+b}{c}\\) for example, and:

• Load the MathJAX Javascript renderer. You can do this by inserting the following into _includes/head.html:

<script type="text/javascript"
  src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
</script>

I'm converted to Python 3, and mainly use Windows right now, a combination which seems problematic for using pygments. So this site use Rouge, but YMMV:

• Jekyll on Windows: Syntax highlighting

• This all worked absolutely fine locally, but wouldn't work when I uploaded it to GitHub. After a massive amount of trial and error, and some cryptic error messages, I finally got a useful error message: rouge isn't supported by GitHub at present. So we comment this out in the _config.yml file and it all works!

• A final wrickle is that, either locally, or on GitHub, I couldn't get automatic syntax highlighting to work. So, for now, we'll do it manually with the {% highlight html %} ... {% endhighlight %} form.

• ← Google Code Jam
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