looking at the commit history for the repository containing the source for this blog, you may notice that this was originally my personal website/cv.

my initial intention was to setup the present blog on a separate branch, but i forgot to switch branches before deleting everything.

in any case, i suppose i'll have to commit to this now. so here is a test post.

testing out

originally, i attempted to use jekyll for this blog, as it is already integrated into github pages. however, after some frustration (as had happened years ago when i last tried it), i decided to look for a different blog building tool.

one of my main points of contention with jekyll is that it uses ruby, which i don't have anything against, but am also entirelly unfamiliar with. therefore, i went searching for a tool that allowed me to stay within what i alredy know (namely, python), and that had built-in markdown support.

i also want it to be doing most of the work. i am not too interested in messing with templates and such at the moment. all i want is to get started on throwing stuff out there.

so i landed on nikola for static site generation. it even has built'in support for extended markdown, seeing that the footnotes are working nicely.

it does have support for images in markdown, but...

here is what the markdown for the previous photo looks like:

![a photo i took while biking in chicago](../../images/2025-03-30_16-37_chicago-skyline-biking.png)

which seems fine, except that the folder structure of this repo looks a little like this (with some omissions for readability):

.
├── images
│   ├── 2025-03-30_16-37_chicago-skyline-biking.png
│   ├── frontispiece.jpg
│   └── illus_001.jpg
├── output
│   ├── images
│   │   ├── 2025-03-30_16-37_chicago-skyline-biking.png
│   │   ├── 2025-03-30_16-37_chicago-skyline-biking.thumbnail.png
│   ├── index.html
│   └── posts
│       ├── setting-up
│       ├── index.html
│       └── index.md
├── posts
│   └── 1.md
└── README.txt

i am writing from ./posts/1.md, and i am placing my image in ./images/. after the build, my post is in ./output/posts/setting-up, and the image is in ./output/images/. meaning that while in this markdown i can use intellisense to access the image with:

../images/2025-03-30_16-37_chicago-skyline-biking.png

however, because the image in the output build is in a different directory, i need to add an additional ../ to the beginning of the image reference¹.

anyway, this is more of a minor pet peeve, so it is fine i guess.

addendum 1

ok, i have another pet peev, this time with github pages. for whatever reason, github pages only allows deployement from root or from /docs²?

so i had to change the output folder of this repo to docs, with the following addition to nikola's conf.py:

OUTPUT_FOLDER = 'docs'

addemdum 2

one last thing for this test post.

nikola came with a number of filed in its demo. i deleted them manually, and then followed the instructions from the getting started page:

nikola check --clean-files