chrisjmccormick / chrisjmccormick.github.io

My machine learning blog, built on Poole

My blog, dedicated to Machine Learning tutorials, code, and insights.

Base Design

My blog is built on top of Poole. I took inspiration and a lot of direction from Joshua Lande and his blog post here.

Because my blog is my GitHub user page (and not just a project page), I worked from the master branch of Poole.

Page Links in Header

Following instructions in Joshua Lande's post, I modified the masthead of the 'default.html' layout and added his code for displaying links to the top level pages. Also, the list of top level pages is defined in _config.yml.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is enabled by simply setting the variable analytics_id in _config.yml.

Time Zone

Initially, I didn't have a timezone set for the site. This actually caused a problem at one point, because the site builder generated my post with a different date than what I put in the post, after converting the time. This was fixed by setting the timezone: America/Los_Angeles in _config.yml.

Math & Equations

Adding support for equations with MathJax was a cinch. I just put the following line in _includes/head.html

<script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" type="text/javascript"></script>

{% highlight html %}

<script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" type="text/javascript"></script>

{% endhighlight %}

WordPress Migration

Since I work in Python, I used the exitwp tool to convert all of my wordpress posts to Jekyll posts in markdown. Wordpress has an option for exporting your entire site as one big XML file, and exitwp is able to take this in and spit out all the images and posts.

One thing I had to consider was "categories". I wanted to setup redirects from my Wordpress site to my Jekyll one, and the Wordpress redirect feature isn't customizeable. The issue this created is that Jekyll uses categories as part of the URL, but Wordpress does not. I opted to simply strip the categories from my posts to simplify things.

Another issue I faced was with the timezones. The funny thing about timezones is that if there are any inconsistencies, it's possible that your blog post will end up published on a different calendar date because of the time difference. I had just this issue, and it caused some of my redirect links to break. I just had to go through the posts and fix the timezones using some find/replace all magic.

Lastly, all of my images in my wordpress site were specifically set in the URL to be displayed at 470px wide. I just used some find/replace all to strip out all instances of this.

Google Adsense

I put the Google Adsense code in _includes/advertising.html and then inserted in my _layouts/posts.html just above the comments.

It took a good day and a half or more before I saw any ads on my site. Until then, the Javascript Adsense Javascript was actually throwing an error! I could see the exception in the Chrome developer tools. Wish they handled that better--getting an exception on your code is unsettling!