in which i develop courage

After some consideration, I think that I can keep this in public. It's going to take me a few days before I can post it, anyway, and I'll have some amount of time to build up the posting habit. Making a low-effort tool for writing from the phone will still be a challenge. But I want to move my goal from "write every day" to "write every day in public," even if I'm not expecting to have an audience.

It occurs to me that lots of this musing might have gone into my perhaps-someday-a-reference about nikola. But right now I'm figuring things out, and I suppose that should be more declarative than interrogative.

Site maps

Let's have a look around. I see from the nikola output that there's a set make that gets made. Where is that stored? Looks like there are /sitemap.xml and /sitemapindex.xml. And they do in fact list every item in the site, including all of the pages. So I shouldn't expect any of those things to be private, even if I don't explicitly link them anywhere else.

Math support

Let's try to turn on MathJax. The Einstein equation of motion for a massive particle is \(E^2 = p^2 + m^2 = {m^2}/{\sqrt{1-v^2}}\), using units where the speed of light is \(c=1\). It's the "new" LaTeX math delimiter \\( and \\), now that the dollar signs are deprecated. However, the display-mode can be activated with $$ as well as \\[ and \\]: \[ e^{i\theta} = \cos\theta + i\sin\theta, \] but also \[ \frac1\mu = \frac1m + \frac1M.\] I think that I'm going to enable KaTeX rather that MathJax. In either case I need to have has_math: true in the metadata for the page source.

Code and plotting support

Next I want to experiment with Python a little bit. I understand that I can use some amount of Python code inline? Or there's plotting? I know that there is some support for Jupyter notebooks as web pages. Let's have a look at that. Here's the right part of the documentation, though that link doesn't look like it'll last forever, since the #anchor ends in a number.

I knew already that I could do in-line code, like

def hello(name="world"):
    print(f"Hello, {name}!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
    hello("everybody")

There is syntax for code listings, but it looks like reStructured Text syntax. Perhaps it will work anyway?

.. listing:: auto/in-which-i-develop-courage/foo.py python

Nope, that's broken. That's an .rst-only syntax.

Update: See the long and the shortcodes of it:

auto/in-which-i-develop-courage/foo.py (Source)

class Foo:
    def __init__(self, bar):
        self.bar = bar

if __name__ == "__main__":
    foo = Foo('baz')
    print(f'{foo.bar=}')

Links and images

And a cute thing to have discovered: links are relative to the directory that this post is in, so I can just add files there. Keeps things organized. Does that mean I can organize stuff, like this self-portrait? It doesn't seem to. Instead I had to add this to /files (although I made /files/images).

That image comes out huge! I didn't realize it was a 1000x1000 pixel image. And I can't resize it manually. Of course the right way is to make an image that has the size and resolution I want, using some image editor. But I can also include HTML directly:

That's the time I have for this morning. But: useful!