I’ve tried a few static site builder with GitHub pages, such as brunch and Metalsmith. Since Jekyll is popular and is recommended for GitHub, I’ve decided to give it a try.

There are several guides on how to deploy a Jekyll site on GitHub, but none seem to do what I want. Github converts the site’s source files into the render website on their servers. However there is a delay between uploading sources and the rendering. This was a problem when I was debugging a configuration issue - I needed to wait awhile before the website was updated.

Before deploying I used jekyll serve to adjust some of the source files. In particular I wanted to include MathJax in order to write equations on my site, such as: \(x \lt y \), which is written as \\(x \lt y \\). The whole process was easy to use. It updates to the local webserver, port 4000, whenever a source file changes.

For MathJax I modified the head.html file to include:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    MathJax.Hub.Config({
      showProcessingMessages: false,
      tex2jax: { inlineMath: [['\\(','\\)']] },
      TeX: { equationNumbers: {autoNumber: "AMS"} }
    });
  </script>

Which restricts the inline math equation delimiters to avoid conflicts with markdown.

I learn enough about Liquid to build a tags page to organize posts according to their tags.

I did a git init, followed by git add ., git commit -m 'again', git push.