This website is largely built upon the al-folio template which is itself a theme for jekyll, a static site generator written in ruby. While these did take several hours to install/reinstall, it was a breeze compared to the usual process of installing astronomical software1.

The better part of a week was then used to modify the template better to my liking. This included:

  • replacing the about page with a homepage
  • addition of videos
  • streamlining and removal of extraneous functions (tagging, dates, rss feeds, github tracker, etc.)
  • defaulting to night mode
  • running the gallery on lightgallery
  • display random publication on ‘about’ page
  • make bibliography functionality compatible with NASA/ADS bibtex exports

The source for this website is available upon request, but as someone with no experience in web development, it’s something that I have built not-to-fail rather than built to be good and extensible. The result is usable but riddled with hardcoded fixes and extraneous pieces.

  1. The difficulty there being that you will either need a to link code to a 40 year-old library written by your advisor’s deceased brother, or you will need to fill half your hard drive with dependencies because astronomers are too lazy to write their own function to invert a matrix. ↩