Hello, World!

Well that was relatively painless.

Here's a site made out of (mostly) jupyter notebooks. This post is just a jupyter notebook. 😎 Thanks, fastpages! 🚀

What Was Easy

  • Setup is a breeze: fastpages made it really easy to setup from their repo. Using an auto-generated pull request, was able to get a new repo up and running with no trouble.
  • Connect to existing stuff: Connecting to GitHub Pages site zachbogart.github.io was easy. Just set it as the baseurl.
  • Tracking Notebooks: Was worried that the use of jupyter notebooks to render the posts might mean that the .ipynb files have to be git tracked. This can be a pain cause there is a lot in each notebook, so running a notebook without changing code will still lead to git changes, which are difficult to parse without additional tools.
    • However, at least for this post, jupytext works like a charm!1 Can work in jupyter notebooks, track python script versions of them, and have it all be rendered to a site. Super awesome. Hope it lasts...

What Will Require More Understanding

  • Handling Images: For previous posts, I used images as thumbnails and at the start of each post. In my experimenting, was finding I had to copy the image in two places: my_icons in the _notebooks folder and in the images folder. Wondering if there is a cleaner way to include an image in just one place (the docs mention that the social media image can only be set under images).
  • It's a big machine: The repo can be pretty intimidating. There are a lot of folders that make it go and a bunch of files with "THIS FILE WAS AUTOGENERATED! DO NOT EDIT!" penciled in. Will take some getting used to, getting comfortable with the setup and knowing what parts I should touch. There are some files that I could burn myself on, so I will go slow, use oven mitts, and try not to void any warranties.

I'll keep the docs handy.

Till next time!

Image Credit

  • waving hello by Zach Bogart from the Noun Project
  • Differential Analyzer from "NASA on The Commons" on Flickr Commons
    • Cool Description: Differential Analyzer built under the direction of Harold Mergler in the Instrument Research Section. The technician is preparing a data report. This equipment was located at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, LFPL, now John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, Cleveland Ohio.

1. Jupytext is a super useful way to save off jupyter notebooks as other formats. I use it all the time. Pairing a notebook is easy and you can just set it and forget it. Note: If in JupyterLab, use "View > Activate Command Palette" or "Shift + Cmd + C" to "Pair..." a notebook format. Took me a while to find out how to do this! ↩