I Settled on Octopress

I decided I like octopress. It’s a framework for blogging with jekyll. It’s not simple to set up, especially since I want to use org-mode to write posts and pages, but after I got it all set up it’s pretty nice.

octopress sets up rake tasks to build new pages and new posts, and can generate and deploy your blog over git, rsync, or heroku. If you’re careful, you can make your site use relative links and set up a preview on your own machine.

The system has a lot of moving parts, but if you read the documentation carefully, you can get it all working. I’ll post an article on the org-mode integration later.

Rendering Mathematical Equations With Mathjax

Christian A. Rodriguez showed me his MathJax enabled pages, and I just found out org-mode supports mathjax too. You just put latex equations in html, and load the javascript. It renders the equation in any browser.

Here’s an example from the MathJax home page:

The raw latex: 

\[ J_\alpha(x) = \sum\limits_{m=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^m}{m! \,
\Gamma(m + \alpha + 1)}{\left({\frac{x}{2}}\right)}^{2 m + \alpha} \]

Renders into: \[ J_\alpha(x) = \sum\limits_{m=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^m}{m! \, \Gamma(m + \alpha + 1)}{\left({\frac{x}{2}}\right)}^{2 m + \alpha} \]

A Helper for Org and Jekyll

org-jekyll-mode provides bindings to generate a new blog post in org mode, with the correct yaml headers and file names. I tried it, but it didn’t seem to put the correct headers in.

Learning to Juggle Rings and 3-ball Mills’s Mess.

Cassandra went to MIT CONVERGE for the weekend and left me her Duncan Juggling Rings. I got a little practice in with them yesterday and today. They’re not fancy, but they work. I hope I can practice enough I can take a stab at dinner plates! I also juggled a bit with clubs, just a straight up cascade, and kept working on my 3-ball tricks. I can do 3-ball cascade, reverse cascade (not pretty), and half-showers (left to right, ok; right to left, not so ok). I’m working on getting Mill’s Mess done, using a couple of youtube videos. I still need to practice a lot.

Making Site Maps and Linking Related Documents in Org-mode and Jekyll.

Abstract

Last post, I noted GTML had features I didn’t know how to emulate in org-mode and jekyll. I’ve found information on site maps and related links in both org and jekyll and want to record it here.

Introduction

GTML is a website generator I’ve used for a long time to generate my personal home page. I’m moving the site to org-mode and jekyll, but still need to learn a few things.

Using template includes to reduce boilerplate

Org-mode allows including options in files, and you can combine the includes and make the org links relative. Each level-N.org file will have the correct relative path to the base of the site.

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-publish-html-tutorial.html#sec-6

Creating Websites With Org-mode and Jekyll

Abstract

The emacs org-mode is a simple, text markup based outliner and personal organizer with a bunch of features for creating extensively hyperlinked notes. By writing simply formatted text and exporting to HTML, you can create web sites. If combined with jekyll, it allows creation of a website with integrated blog. The best part is that no software is required server side, making the generated site virtually unhackable. Org-mode and jekyll compile the site to static html, and can be made responsive with css and javascript (e.g., bootstrap).

Introduction

My personal homepage http://www.hpcf.upr.edu/~humberto/ has for many years been generated with GTML, a static website generator that combines several tools. My version is ancient, and I’ve been wanting to update my (rather plain) website to a new style for some time, so I started looking around for alternatives.

I want my site to look nicer than the old one, so I started with bootstrap, a javascript library for creating good looking pages with minimal effort. To use bootstrap, you need to write your entire page in html. Writing plain html is a pain, so I searched for template languages that work with bootstrap. Jekyll is the site generator for github-pages, and works nicely with bootstrap. Jekyll supports various markup languages (principally markdown) out of the box, simplifying website generation.

I remembered an article on using org-mode and jekyll, and decided to try combining them for my site. It takes quite a bit of setup work, but the result is very flexible, and I think it looks quite nice.

Methods

I started by creating a jekyll site following the quickstart. Then I modified the default template to include bootstrap. At this stage, it’s convenient to use the jekyll serve command to test the site. Once the jekyll + boostrap is working, I created a directory for the org project. I moved the jekyll site into the project directory, and created an org directory parallel to the jekyll directory, as recommended in the tutorial.

The final step is to create a project file. I created a project.el file in the project directory, where I define the org-publish project. I had some trouble because the version of org complained about argument count mismatches. Following the instructions in this stack overflow post solved the issue. 

(require 'ox-publish)
(require 'ox-html)
;(require 'org-publish)
(setq org-publish-project-alist
      '(

  ("org-humberto"
	  ;; Path to your org files.
	  :base-directory "~/src/web/test-org-jekyll/org/"
	  :base-extension "org"

	  ;; Path to your Jekyll project.
	  :publishing-directory "~/src/web/test-org-jekyll/jekyll/"
	  :recursive t
	  :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
	  ;; :headline-levels 4 
	  ;; :html-extension "html"
	  :body-only t ;; Only export section between <body> </body>
	  :with-toc nil ;; don't export toc, it clobbers the yaml front matter
    )

    ("org-static-hoz"
	  :base-directory "~/src/web/test-org-jekyll/org/"
	  :base-extension "css\\|js\\|png\\|jpg\\|gif\\|pdf\\|mp3\\|ogg\\|swf\\|php"
	  :publishing-directory "~/src/web/test-org-jekyll/jekyll"
	  :recursive t
	  :publishing-function org-publish-attachment)

    ("hoz" :components ("org-humberto" "org-static-hoz"))

))

After evaluating the above code, running C-c C-e pops up a page of export options, and selecting P, x exports a named project. This pulls all the org files from the org tree, and publishes html in the jekyll tree.

Results

The combination of org-mode, jekyll and bootstrap makes a simple website generator with lots of features. There are lots of other ways to do the same thing, but org-mode has a lot of smarts on the editing side, making life simpler for the writer (e.g., links are live in the markup language).

There are two features I still don’t know how to emulate in the new setup. GTML can define new macros, like: 

define doi(uri) <a href="http://dx.doi.org/uri">doi: uri</a>

Jekyll allows includes and variables, but I’m not sure I can define a parametrized macro like the above. Fortunately, org-mode can provide the same functionality. Here’s org-mode’s version of macros: 

#+MACRO: doi [[http://dx.doi.org/$1][doi:$1]]

The other feature I like about GTML is that it can generate a site index with all the files defined in the project, and next, previous and up links on each page. I know org mode can do the same, but I haven’t yet read how to do it and integrate into this site.