Some useful tools and tricks learned while trying to make this blog:

  • Creating this blog with Github pages
  • Using M2MD to facilitate conversion of Mathematica notebooks into Markdown
  • (Although tempting to use Wolfdown, there are a bunch of hardcoded options which were harder to parse)
  • How to add tags? Ordinarily Jekyll requires some add ons, but this post describes how to do it with default github pages. I didn’t have much luck, but one day I’ll figure it out. Here’s a step by step instruction guide to adding this information that I will try one day
  • Funny things with double squiggly-braces. You may get an Error: Liquid syntax error (line 35): Variable \{\{-1, 0.9\} was not properly terminated type error when exporting mathematica lists. This is because Jekyll uses double squigglies for commands…even when these are inside verbatim code cells. Just add a space and you’ll be fine. Alternatively you can wrap these inside … to avoid this. It might be a good idea to do this for code cells in general. I’ll consider modifying the ToJekyll function to do this
  • How to link between different posts in Jekyll. This article is also quite helpful in describing the differences between different linking styles and modifying the configuration.
  • When including multi-line markdown code lines, it is useful to indicate the programming language after the triple-backtick that opens a code block. I’ve also found that the Jekyll processor can misinterpret # characters inside code blocks unless there is a newline before and after the start/end of the triple backtick. Easily resolved, but something to keep in mind.