i finally bit the bullet and moved my website and blog to github pages. all in all, it was fairly straight forward, and the jekyll backend offers a lot of nice features for technical blog writing:

  1. you can write your pages in markdown (though you don’t have to, you can use html if you want)

  2. you can include blocks of code trivially using markdown’s ``` syntax:

     import numpy as np

 def blog(**kwargs):
     return str(4+5)

  3. you can use latex for math:

    \[\sigma _{x}\sigma _{p}\geq {\frac {\hbar }{2}}\]

    to set this up, i followed this write-up (though i didn’t need to change the markdown backend from github’s default)

  4. you can inherit from a template, and easily overwrite/overload portions. e.g., i started with the minima template and i added my tweaks onto that. you can, of course, see how i set everything up on https://github.com/bbabenko/bbabenko.github.io.

  5. you can write an entire post in a python/jupyter notebook, and easily convert that into a markdown file to be published on your blog. the code blocks and latex will get rendered as expected. to do this, you can just run the jupyter nbconvert SOME_NOTEBOOK.ipynb --to markdown command; you’ll need to make some very minor adjustments to the .md file that is rendered (mostly just fixing the paths to figures). this is a pretty killer feature/workflow, in my opinion. see this page for more info.

migrating old blog posts required some elbow grease (and i didn’t migrate all of them), but all in all i am happy with the result!