As Apple stopped the support of the old iWeb (which I used almost for a decade to generate simple course pages for my students) in the newer versions of Mac OS X, I have finally decided to update and redesign my webpage (and current course pages) using Jekyll. My old personal page had been carved in plain old-vintage-school HTML, using simple examples available on the web, plus trial and error.

I first asked our departamental webmaster for expert advice for dummies like me, on simple web design programs for Mac OS X (hoping in fact for something visual and simple, a sort of wysiwyg editor of pages for people with zero knowledge about HTML, web design etc.). Her answer was:

I can try and look up sth for you but personally I generate static web sites using Jekyll.

If you do not know what a static site is, do ask Google, as I did. It became apparent that Jekyll transforms a set of plain text files written in Markdown to (nice) static pages, and that there are tons of free and ready-to-use Jekyll themes and templates. Markdown did ring a bell: I use it for simple notes and sometimes for longer non-mathematical texts. So, I decided to read some documentation and experiment and…

After the first weekend, I had a full Jekyll environment on my Macbook. This text of Amanda Visconti helped a lot. I could also test the design of a simplest possible site on my local server. Then, asking a few questions to Google, I found György Kovács blog post on Jekyll Scholar which allows you to generate publications lists on web pages from .bib files (all of us have them, n’est-ce pas?) and, after a few more not-quite-painless hours, could add a page with a list of publications to my test copy of Amanda Visconti’s page.

Then, for a brief time, things became harder. After a second conversation with our webmaster I have learned that it is a bad idea (at least for me, with my zero knowledge of Jekyll, Ruby etc.) to try to incorporate features or elements of one Jekyll theme into another one. The right idea is to find a Jekyll theme which suits you most. So, I looked at dozens of pages that various academics have designed using Jekyll.

Eventually, it has turned out that the right theme for me could be al-folio. I have briefly considered minimal mistakes but al-folio had the Jekyll Scholar already implemented, TeX support already implemented, and seemed to require less work than minimal mistakes. For a brief moment I thought that Hugo and its Academic theme might be the best solution; my friend and co-author Armin Schikorra has a page that was built that way. However, after a few more not-quite-painless experiments I decided to stick to Jekyll.

To a fellow mathematician who might be accidentally reading this text, I address the following comments:

  • the advantages of Jekyll over iWeb and similar programs are, at first glance, similar to the advantages of TeX over ChiWriter (some of you might still remember it) and other wysiwyg text editors;
  • the learning threshold (in order to start to use Jekyll) was not very low for me, but once you read a bit and decide to learn from examples, life becomes simpler and after a while you are able to concentrate on the contents only (or mostly);
  • if you never heard about Markdown and its syntax: do not worry, it is much simpler than TeX;
  • so, if you regularly update your departamental webpage, e.g. after each lecture, telling your students what you have covered, Jekyll might work for you, too.

As for now: please do excuse any incomplete parts of this site. In fact, as almost every other academic web page, it is a bit like a cathedral: a bit old-fashioned, always under reconstruction :wink: (copyleft: Rob Kusner). And yes, Markdown supports hundreds of emojis.

To end up: the al-folio theme supports rendering math in inline and display modes using the KaTeX engine. You just need to surround your math expression with double dollar signs $$, like $$ \zeta(s)=\sum n^{-s} $$. There is a minor difference with TeX: if you leave it inside a paragraph, it will produce an inline expression, just like .

To use display mode, you place the expression as a separate paragraph. Here is an example:

Note that KaTeX is work in progress, so it does not support the full range of math expressions as, say, MathJax. However, I tested a few, and for simple blogging about the last lecture or a new preprint it should be more than enough.