I’ve finally got this new website built using Jekyll and migrated my old content over. I’ve been looking to move to a new system for a while - one that would fit with my workflow and help me keep a blog as an open lab notebook. Squarespace was a great place to start a blog, but a Jekyll site hosted on Github is (A) faster, (B) free, (C) more customizable.
This blog will have a somewhat different format than the last. It’s mostly an open lab notebook, a record of my ongoing research efforts and a place to do collaborative research. Not everything will be polished or generally accessible. That said, I also plan to post items here of general interest, under the “general” tag. I may separate that out onto a separate page/blog/rss feed.
Feedback on both form and content is welcome.
Notes on workflow
A few notes about the site. I’m using a fork of Jekyll that uses Pandoc to process markdown into HTML. I write almost everything in Pandoc-markdown and this lets me use the same format for blog posts, lecture notes, and papers that end up in LaTeX or MS Word format. By supplementing Pandoc, with Mathjax, knitr and Mendeley I am able to include citations, math, and code in my blog posts and everything else.
The design is a mix of ideas I got from the blog at scriptogr.am and CSS sheets from Brett Terpstra’s Marked.app . I use Brett’s NValt with Marked to do all of my drafting and storing of notes, and switch to TextMate when I need a more extensions. I have a TextMate script that lets me go from composing my post in markdown to publishing it on Github with one keystroke.