Switching to Jekyll

April 5, 2013

I finally decided to move away from my old Trac blog at Matforge. Jekyll Bootstrap seems like a good alternative as most of my research has moved to Github repositories in the last year. The main benefit of the Trac blog was the close integration with the Subversion repository, which I now of course no longer use. The overriding benefit of using Jekyll is having the posts stored as plain markup in a local Git repository independently from either the blogging tool or the blog design. Also, using Jekyll presents a very low barrier to switching between blogging tools. There is also the added benefit of testing locally before publishing.

Resources

The Jekyll Bootstrap site has most of the requirements for setting up the blog. To add in maths support I found Dason Kurkiewicz’s site which had very clear instructions. So, using the Mathjax plugin

\frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} = -\phi^2 + a^2

renders as

$\frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} = -\phi^2 + a^2$

and the code highlighting looks good

for i in range(10):
    print i

I chose to use “the-minimum” Jekyll Bootstrap theme and tweaked only a very few things. Unfortunately, I don’t know nearly enough about the way Jekyll and css work to make the changes that I want at the moment. Hopefully, the site will improve over time.

Other resources:

A list of nice Jekyll Bootstrap sites.