About
Why create a blog?
A big part of my inspiration was a blog I found a while back by Glenn Rowe who took a similar journey and created an amazing amount of content. He has excellent notes that literally start at first year physics and go all the way to graduate level topics like general relativity and quantum field theory. His blog is always growing with new content. http://www.physicspages.com
How is was this site created?
This site was built entirely using freely available tools. At it’s core is an easy to use website and blog creation system called Jekyll. Jekyll has several benefits for creating a site like this one:
- it has full Latex math support. I used several cheat sheets for writing math in Latex. This one from Jim Hefferon Latex Cheatsheet gives a nice well rounded view. This one from Rutgers is extremely thorough Latex Reference
- it has been integrated into GitHub Pages which provides an easy (and free!) way to manage and serve the content.
- for those of us who are graphic design challenged, Jekyll has many visual themes available, and I start with one called “Forty” which I then heavily modified.
- I use Geogebra to create diagrams which I export to SVG format for use in my pages.
- for interactive graphs, I’ve been experimenting with two Javascript libraries: JSXGraph and D3.
I find GitHub Desktop to be a convenient way to deploy my local git repo up to the Github website and sync it back down. The editing tool I’ve been using is the freely available Visual Studio Code. This also supports git, allowing you to commit changes, see diffs, etc.