I’ve always a little piece of the internet that’s mine - and if I’m going to write more here, I’d love for it to be on something I created. Until recently, my website has been a Jekyll template hosted on GitHub Pages. The old blog has worked well, but I still wanted something I could customize more and feel more personal.
The source code is at this repo and the mentioned scripts are linked.
Point 1. The Jekyll template allowed me to make posts using markdown, something I enjoyed. It’s quite easy to write and has the advantage of being able to support fancy-looking LaTeX commands I use for my notes: \(\pi^2 = 10\)
Point 2. The site should be able to host my old posts as well as my class notes (old location), which are also written in markdown. (Aside: if you type out your class notes, I highly recommend posting them online. It’s always easy to access and others can see it, which is great motivation!) The GitHub Pages site automatically updated whenever I pushed a commit - this should be equally easy!
Point 3. It should be simple enough for me to understand and quickly try out changes. I don’t want to spend 30 minutes trying to get why some template is configured the way it is.
Finally, it should feel like something I made!
I discovered Pandoc while taking a class and wanted to use it for this. I took one of my old blog posts and ran it through pandoc to convert it to html, and it worked pretty well! I made some modifications to the default template used, mainly including a header, supporting LaTeX, and adding some CSS. Now, I could write pages in markdown and quickly convert it to html!
To create the all of the html files on each update, I wrote a simple
bash script (build.sh)
to iterate and convert all files in specified directories, and voila!
I’ve got a working build process!
To host this site, I’ve got a AWS Lightsail server which costs
~$5/month. I have another simple script (update.sh)
which pulls all updates from GitHub, then builds the site. Whenever I
want to add something, I just need to push it to GitHub, then update the
site on the server via ssh:
ssh lightsail-server /var/www/site/update.sh
I’m looking forward to writing more (substantial) posts on here :) Carter