First Blog: A Test.#
This is my first blog. I have ideas that I never write down, so I want to start to get more practice and get back to writing more.
How I got here.#
This is just a test. The goal is to get some words down in .rst and test out the styling. I’m particularly grateful to this blog explaining how to make a blog in sphinx for getting me this far.
The good things#
It as relatively easy to build the blog from my base sphinx page. Once I had the right extensions installed, it all worked quite quickly. I’m especially impressed with the blog post panel viewer using the spinx_panels package. It looks very nice and integrates well with the pydata_sphinx_theme I was already using.
Some issues#
Some issues did come up while I was setting my blog. Some major to my python usage, others to the website. The biggest issue is I realized pip was installing all packages globally, rather to my anaconda environment. I for some reason didn’t notice this even though I try and using good programming hygiene and always install packages and write code in appropriate environment. So, I’m a little worried about the future of my machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year or so a new package I need (or one I always use) deprecates something or has a dependency issue I cannot easily resolve without wiping python clean and restarting. I’ve been though this before, so it isn’t a big issue. However, it is a pain.
I’m also a little worried though about deployment. The ablog package requies you to “serve” the website, which looks like it turns the static page references into some http request structure. Since this is different from sphinx make html command which builds all links into the static pages. Since I’m not hosting my website, but rather my university is, it could be a pain to try and figure out how to properly deploy to their system.
Conclusion#
Either way, this feels like a big upgrade. The ablog package feels convenient and powerful. There are straightforward ways to deploy to a github website, which I have. Probably at a certain point, I’ll just transition my faculty page to redirect to my github.io website and push builds there, rather than deal with official faculty page nonsense.
Thanks for reading my thoughts. This is just the beginning.