Making of My Personal Blog

This blog has been built with Jupyter Book 2, powered by the MyST engine.

Honestly, I have spent too much time trying to build a personal website. The first attempt was about 8 years ago, which ended up in a Jekyll-based static webpage hosted on Github. I was not too happy about it, but it was acceptable and I kept it for a number of years. I have since then learned to use Nuxt. I learned a lot about front-end programming, and became familiar with Vue. However, I eventually realized that there was no one-stop solution to solve all my problems of having a website that I needed to manage while looking good; most of the times, the trouble of building a whole website just for blogging and uploading a couple Jupyter notebooks is not quite worth the effort.

Fortunately for me, I discovered that Jupyter Book 2 provides everything I need; it even supports Tufte-sytle notes on the side margin. I do most of my writing in Markdown anyways, and the YAML-style frontmatter is also useful in maintaining a quick but useful database of my blog entries (although this blog will be very sparsely updated, I fear). The future roadmap for Jupyter Book 2 also looks very promising.

So I gave up on trying to come up with a solution for myself. I enjoy solving problems through the bottom-up approach, and that is how I survived graduate school, but unfortunately my time in this world is limited. Still, I am happy with this, and that is quite an improvement.