Personal pages reloaded
This is a new reincarnation of my personal web page. After trying Wordpress and some other CMS (perhaps it was Droopal), I learnt to stick to static page generators. My first attempt was Nikola. It mostly worked, but a version update broke the theme I was using, so I decided to try something more stable. A colleague (the same who had introduced me to Nikola) pointed out Hugo, and I went for that, seeing it had a nice bilingual academic theme. However, it ended up being too complicated for me. I had a hard time setting it up, though I eventually succeeded, but then after a while I wanted to make minor changes and couldn’t; I was stuck with the theme I had chosen I couldn’t even make minor tweaks. It’s not necessarily Hugo’s fault (or my colleague’s :) ). I’m far from an expert on web publishing, but I cannot afford to become one.
So now I turned to Jekyll. I had considered Jekyll before Hugo, but the documentation scared me away (or more accurately, the fact that it seemed to imply that I would have to write my own .css). But this time I went through: now we have LLMs to help, and I got one to set up a Jekyll configurations with a .css that produces a decent-looking site. The whole setup looks simpler, with the added advantage that there is no need to build locally. I just run the local server to check the appearance of any added/updated pages, then simply push the source to my tgrigera.github.io repository at GitHub and the site is built automatically with next to zero configuration.
I migrated the site to the new configuration with the exception of old blog posts that no longer make sense. I only kept a few, in particular this post on reference management which is still useful, I only regret that I lost the nice discussion it sparkled, which included comments from the author of helm-bibtex.