Penn Genetics recently held a wonderful retreat at Bear Creek Moutain resort. I enjoyed the many wonderful scientific talks at the retreat, but I was most moved by Arjun Raj’s call to action: blog. At the retreat, Arjun also delivered a great talk on How to give a talk.
I have always wanted to start a blog since graduate school when I read Daniel Lakens’ post on why blog posts may have higher quality than scientific journals. I highly recommend you have a read. Personally, I think these posts are great for formalizing one’s thoughts on scientific concepts or experiment ideas. However, I feared that I needed to read a lot more before I write, and the lack of a personal website added to my hesitation.
A few days after the retreat, I stumbled upon Noam Ross’ newly created site on twitter, and I fell in love!
The fonts, theme, basic Kube setups, Tufte design… everything I have ever wanted!
Well, almost everything.
The only thing I didn’t love is Noam’s choice of syntax highlighting, and his lua filter also didn’t quite work for me, so I removed this file and changed _output.yml to
Now, this action creates another issue. You see, this code adds to the generated .html style tags and everything in between
which means Hugo .Summary is now filled with nonsense such as
a.sourceLine { display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25; }.
I try to strip out this style chunk with replaceRE and plainify in my layouts/section/blog.html, but that didn’t work.
Finally, Yihui Xie’s post on how to generate a Hugo summary came to the rescue.
Why didn’t I look for Yihui’s advice in the first place?!
Following Yihui’s guide gets me very close but still not quite what is expected.
Finally, 林志扬’s incredible insight saves the day.
I suggest using
(.|\n)*?instead of.*?when searching for paragraph contents, since a single line break won’t start a new paragraph.
I probably should not have spent this much time on syntax highlighting, but I desperately wanted some highlighting. And yes, I do need a crash course on regular expression.
Here’s to the beginning of something new, a personal website that I’m, at the moment, very excited about. With or without scientific content, I hope to keep the blog updated with my musings. And who knows, I may be able use some material I write here for my scientific outputs (given the journal permits citations of blogposts).
The bike crew before heading back to Philly from Bear Creek (we did 120+ miles in total!). *Photoshop in our last biker Bill La Cava here*.