Colophon1

After some years of updating my static web site designed and implemented through iWeb, I decided to look for a more modern solution that could help me to publish in a rapid way all my papers and new infos about my research and career. While considering web sites of my colleagues abroad, I discovered static site generators, in particular jemdoc and Jekyll.

I realised the benefits of a static site: speed, no way to be hacked other than through the server, portability also on older web servers. Looking around web sites using such technologies, I saw Mark Reid’s site and I appreciated very much its elegant and clean style. Mark allows people to borrow the design, so I did.

Regarding the site structure, I was inspired also by Kyle Niemeyer, so I would say that my web site owe a lot to those guys. Many thanks!!!

The Mechanics

The content of this site begins life as a directory full of text files on my MacBook Pro written using editors like TextMate, TextWrangler or the nice (available also to Windows users) Sublime Text in a format called Markdown. I can manage all those text files by using the version control system git.

To update the site, the text files are first transformed into HTML by Kramdown with LaTeX equations rendered by MathJax.

Jekyll orchestrates the whole process, adding headers, navigation bars and the like, creating a directory full of static HTML ready to be served.

Finally, I then upload through SFTP the newly created site to my department server.

Licence

Unless specified otherwise, all design and content within this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The main site design was not done by me, but rather Mark Reid, so you should contact him if you want to use it. The cookies enabler (and the corresponding banner) has been strongly inspired by the Nicholas Ruggeri’s cookies-enabler.

  1. Some web designers borrowed from publishing the term colophon and made it a page for describing the software used to design the site, the used fonts, and any other technical details needed for hosting the web content.