New Blog

After writing quite a few "private blogs" (translate: journal entries) over the years, I've decided to start a public blog on Github.

I'm using Cryogen (rather than Jekyll or Hugo or whatever million other options there are out there) because I fell in love with Clojure. The setup was simple. Just run

$ lein new cryogen blog
$ cd blog
$ lein ring server

This will get you a static site up and running.

Now, instead of following the advice on setting up a Github page on the cryogen docs, I did the following (which I found easier to maintain):

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "initial commit" # ensure git knows about your subtree dir
$ git subtree push --prefix resources/public/blog origin gh-pages

You can also create a little shell script (found here) to help you do the deploy to gh-pages process.

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
  echo "Which folder do you want to deploy to GitHub Pages?"
  exit 1
fi
git subtree push --prefix $1 origin gh-pages

and in the future you can just run the script and pass in the proper directory!

Customizing the theme

I'm a huge fan of David Nolen's talks and his blog, and having found another Cryogen user who was uh, heavily inspired by (stole?) his blog's style, I decided to give it a go as well. The theme looks super simple, which is fitting for any Clojurist :).

The main hurdle I came across was when dealing with Selmer for the first time. Essentially, the issue is that the "tags" button should only be highlighted when the url is "/blog/tags.html", and I didn't know how to get the current URL.

After fumbling around for a bit, (ok, like 40 minutes), I finally decided to "be brave" (translate: not be a noob) and dig the source to find what parameters where exactly being passed to the template. And there it was, uri (doh!).

So it turns out things are pretty simple. God bless open source :).

Complaints about Cryogen

It appears that the markdown parser doesn't support the full markdown specification. For example, the horizontal lines had to be created with <hr> rather than ---. Not a huge deal, but not so nice.

Also, creating a new theme was a bit weird as the structure doesn't follow the provided theme structures. (to make a new theme I need to have a dosynctemplates folder in addition to a dosync folder?).

I'll try to submit some pull requests at some point if time permits...

But otherwise, a pleasant experience.

Depending on how life goes, hopefully we'll be seeing more posts on coding, math, life at Stanford etc. in the future!