First Post!

2025 Hindsight: A tradition of every attempt to rebuild my ‘home on the internet’ is one of these - some sort of technical commentary on the process of building and testing it.*

Introduction

I want to host articles somewhere I can link to, but I don’t want to bother with managing a site. So am setting up a static site using Hugo, and GitHub Actions so when I push a new markdown post, it automatically appears on site.

Within the site there are a number of things I think I might like to have:

Code blocks

I sometimes put code into things. It could be inline like sudo make me a sandwich or it could be a code block.

10 PRINT 'HELLO'
20 GOTO 20

Some themes make it easy to copy code and paste it. Some make it harder (Medium I’m looking at you). Some even have syntax highlighting which is pretty cool.

Equations (even if theme doesn’t support them)

Some suggest Katex is a good renderer for equations like this $$x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}.$$ because it is faster than others.

So to get that working I needed to add to the theme I’m using, as it doesn’t support by default. Fortunately there were a couple of helpful resources for this:

There is a link here on the Katex site to a code block like the one below. Go get the version there as it might have changed. Apparently linking to javascript assets without integrity checks and frozen versions is a bad thing. Who knew?

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/katex.min.css" integrity="sha384-Cqd8ihRLum0CCg8rz0hYKPoLZ3uw+gES2rXQXycqnL5pgVQIflxAUDS7ZSjITLb5" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/katex.min.js" integrity="sha384-1Or6BdeNQb0ezrmtGeqQHFpppNd7a/gw29xeiSikBbsb44xu3uAo8c7FwbF5jhbd" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/contrib/auto-render.min.js" integrity="sha384-vZTG03m+2yp6N6BNi5iM4rW4oIwk5DfcNdFfxkk9ZWpDriOkXX8voJBFrAO7MpVl" crossorigin="anonymous"
    onload="renderMathInElement(document.body);"></script>

This blogger managed to get past tetchy threads on the Hugo discussion site, and came up with a way of telling Katex to ’listen’ for the conventional delimiters $$ and $ by adding

<script>
    document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
        renderMathInElement(document.body, {
            delimiters: [
                {left: "$$", right: "$$", display: true},
                {left: "$", right: "$", display: false}
            ]
        });
    });
</script>

And, to be fair, the theme maintainer has some handy hints here but the amount to the same thing

Concenate the bits of code from above, and save as math.html in /layouts/partials. It’ll look something like this

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/katex.min.css" integrity="sha384-Cqd8ihRLum0CCg8rz0hYKPoLZ3uw+gES2rXQXycqnL5pgVQIflxAUDS7ZSjITLb5" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/katex.min.js" integrity="sha384-1Or6BdeNQb0ezrmtGeqQHFpppNd7a/gw29xeiSikBbsb44xu3uAo8c7FwbF5jhbd" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.13.2/dist/contrib/auto-render.min.js" integrity="sha384-vZTG03m+2yp6N6BNi5iM4rW4oIwk5DfcNdFfxkk9ZWpDriOkXX8voJBFrAO7MpVl" crossorigin="anonymous"
    onload="renderMathInElement(document.body);"></script>

<script>
    document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
        renderMathInElement(document.body, {
            delimiters: [
                {left: "$$", right: "$$", display: true},
                {left: "$", right: "$", display: false}
            ]
        });
    });
</script>

Then make a copy of extend_head.html, from /theme/PaperMod/layouts/partials, put it in /layouts/partials and add the line {{ partial "math.html" . }}. This is inelegant as it means we load katex.js on every page not just those with maths in, but for me that makes it simpler as I don’t need to remember to put math: true in the front matter of the markdown of posts containing math. It does at least mean that, because the theme provides extend_head.html, the site won’t break when the theme updates.

Boring stuff to check the rendering of

I write things that are

Sometimes in bullets
Like this And on other occasions

They
Are
Numbered

And below this is a horizontal rule - the rules for these are finicky - need a return before.

Sometimes pictures are nice

Here is hopefully a picture

A picture of a turnip, used as a placeholder image for a first post.

What else? Not sure.

Here’s a sentence with a footnote. Note that the horizontal rule below gets automatically (if it gets added). ¹

This is the footnote. ↩︎