A Researcher's Jekyll

There are myriads of ways to build websites. When I decided to create a new one for my work, I evaluated my past experiences – mostly with Wordpress and JoomlaI don’t know if there is a use-case for Joomla. – and decided to go with something less bloated. That is, something that

I ended up choosing Jekyll, a Ruby application that generates static HTML pages from plain text source. There is lots of documentation on Jekyll on the web, so I will just quickly relate some adaptions I made that may be relevant to other researchers.

  1. I wanted the site to work as well as possible without Javascript. In particular, visitors dropping by with active script blocking – a practice I support fully – should be able to see something, and read everything.

    In particular, that meant getting rid of icon fonts; a weird practice if you ask me. Lucky for me, the IcoMoon App exports icon sets as SVG as well, so that is what I use for the links in the footer. Those icons specific to academia I got from Academicons; thanks, James!

    As a side note, I have not taken any care about old browsers. I’ll use recent CSS, SVG and maybe HTML5 down the line. If any of that gives you trouble, please do yourself a favor and upgrade.

  2. That said, I do need mathematics typesetting and thus MathJax. MathJax is not the only way to get mathematics on a website, but it is the only one I have found bearable. It is a quite heavy Javascript dependency but I think it is worth it.

    I have taken care to include it only on pages where it may be needed, and the full version only where I know it is needed.

    If you want to see rendered mathematics, you need to allow scripts from this domain and mathjax.org.

  3. Comments are one thing that is impossible to implement with a static site generator. Since I appreciate comments to my often opinionated posts, I needed a solution.

    As a user, I have found Disqus to be a useful service. I have to assume that they track their users, so Inspired by the efforts of heise.de. I have taken care that even with Javascript enabled you have to opt-in to the feature.

    If you want to use the commenting feature, you have to allow scripts from this domain, disqus.com and disquscdn.com, and click on that thing below the post in question.

  4. A convenient way to include literature references is an absolute must. Of course there is a plugin for that, jekyll-scholar. It works quite well out of the box.

    However, I elected to tweak both the CSS styling and the citation style I chose a bit, and wrote plugins for text citations and fixing some issues of the bibliography. I am quite satisfied with the result now.

  5. I wrote some convenience plugins, e. g. for properly typeset abbreviations. The biggest development effort went into my TikZ plugin. It allows you to specify TikZ code right in your post files which is then converted into SVG behind the scenes. Pretty exciting!

  6. I have decided to host on Github Pages for now. This has the advantage that I just have to push my changes to a Git repository and they go live almost immediately.

    However, Github does not allows most plugins for safety reasons so I have to compile locally. This results in two branches, This is the first time I have used Git branches. one for the sources and one for the compiled site.

    This is the basic process of making a change to the site:

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    git checkout sources
    ... make changes ...
    git commit -m "Something new"
    jekyll build -d /tmp/website
    git checkout master
    cp -r /tmp/website/* ./
    git add [new files]
    git commit -a -m "Something new"
    git push --all
    

So, if you are curious about how I have done something on these pages you can just head over to Github and check out the sources yourself.

Nota bene: I ported some posts which I thought would fit here from my old blog. I hope to post more, new things soon.


A Researcher's Jekyll - December 1, 2015 - Raphael Reitzig