My personal website

This website uses the Nanoc static website generator with a set of custom libs, tips and tricks to offer some useful features:

• Automatic generation of a "Publications" pages from a .bib file
• Seemless News/blog section with articles written as HTML or Markdown
• Publication of HTML5/CSS3 slides made with Reveal.js, possibly written in Markdown

Installing and compiling

To compile the website you must first install the dependencies using Bundler. If you don't already have it installed:

$ gem install bundler

Then install the dependencies:

$ bundler install

To compile the website:

$ bundle exec nanoc

The generated files will be put in the output directory.

The website can then be served locally:

$ bundle exec nanoc view

This will serve the website at http://localhost:3000.

Features

Here are details about a few interesting features.

Publications page

The bibtex file static/publications/publications.bib is read to generate the /publications/ page automatically. Publications are sorted by year.

Inside the .bib file, a PDF key can be added to entries to provide a download link for the publications:

@article{turing1936,
  title={On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem},
  author={Turing, Alan Mathison},
  journal={J. of Math},
  volume={58},
  number={345-363},
  pages={5},
  year={1936},
  pdf = {/download/turing-computable-numbers.pdf}
}

The provided link is relative to content.

News

Nanoc will look for blog articles under content/news; this directory must implement a structure such as the one presented below:

• 2015
  • 05
    • some-html-article.html
    • an-article-written-in-markdown.md
  • 08
• 2016
  • 02
    • something-happened.md

The path to the article will determine the URL to which the page will be published, e.g. the article 2016/02/something-happened.md will be published at /news/2016/02/something-happened/.

The file extension determines if the article should go through the morkdownn compiler or not.

The page /news/ will be automatically created and paginated according to the page_size variable set in nanoc.yaml.

An article should follow the following template:

---
kind: article
title: The article title
created_at: 2016/02/15
---

This is an abstract
<!--more-->

Here goes the full article...

The created_at variable in the preamble is used to display the article date on the webpage and to order the articles by date.

Using the <!--more--> marker tells the compiler to display only a portion of the article (the one before the marker) in the paginated list of articles.

Reveal.js slides

One interesting features brought by the combination of Nanoc and Reveal.js is to have slides written in Markdown and compiled with the rest of the slides, not by the client browser.

For this to work, simply put your slides under a directory called slides, with a .md or .html extension. The first lines of each file must provide the page title and a Reveal.js theme:

---
title: The page title
theme: the-theme
---