How to add blog post
posted on May 16, 2020

We use Jekyll to create Lemas lab blog. All of the blogs are hosted on Github LemasLab. Using Jekyll is a very easy way to an add post on lemaslab.github.io. All the posts are located in _posts folder located in emaslab.github.io/_posts/. Post arrangement is based on date. Each post can be written in markdown format (also in html too, use <br> for entering a new line). File name of each post is in year-month-date-post-name.md format such as 2020-05-16-how-to-add-blog.md or 2016-01-14-paper101.md. On top of each post, you just have to state 3 main things in markdown before writing a post: title, description and categories as follows:

---
Title: Summer School in Computational Sensory-Motor Neuroscience (CoSMo)
Description: All links to CoSMo summer school in computational neuroscience materials
Categories: Scientists
Author: Your name
---

Where categories can be only 4 choices: publication, people, resources, and blog. It will automatically put that blog post on the page depending on categories you put. description will be shown when you share on social media like Facebook or Twitter.

There are multiple ways for someone to add posts:

git clone https://github.com/{your account}/lemaslab.github.io.git

_This way you can install Jekyll and test to see your post on local computer by running jekyll serve on terminal (after you follow instruction). For example, this post has blog categories, I can see preview of my blog on localhost:4000/blog before I push to LemasLab.github.io. Then, follow the rest on the instructions on the GitHub page to push your blog post and create a pull request. Remember: DO NOT MERGE WITHOUT PERMISSION.

Add math equation

No problem, Jekyll allows you to add math equation!

To add inline math, we don’t use $ like in LaTeX since it can be conflicted with a lot of actual dollar sign so we have to use \\( and \\) as opening and closing bracket instead i.e.
\\(\mathbf{y} = A \mathbf{x}\\) will render as \(\mathbf{y} = A \mathbf{x}\)

For one-line equation, we can use the same as LaTeX that is
$$\cfrac{d}{dt}\cfrac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{q}} = \cfrac{\partial L}{\partial q}$$. It will render as

\[\cfrac{d}{dt}\cfrac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{q}} = \cfrac{\partial L}{\partial q}\]

Add code snippet

For inline code, it’s the same format as simple markdown format. Use back tick (symbol below tilde) to highlight inline code. If you want to add multiple line of codes, see jekyllrb.com/docs/templates/ for more information. Basically we will use liquid tag highlight <programming language> and endhighlight as beginning and end tag for code snippet. Or you can simple use triple back tick same as when you write README.md on Github repository.

For images link, we can add html as follows

<figure><center>
  <img width="300" src="http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/4/4d/git.png"/>
</center></figure>

For Youtube, you can just copy embed link from Youtube (share > embed). For example,

<center>
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pF5xBtaL3YI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</center>

Again, why Jekyll?

First, Jekyll allows very easy way to transform and render plain markdown file (lingua franca of open-source community) to html which is our blog. It’s free hosting on with Github pages which just updating to Jekyll 3.0 which is much faster. See more at GitHub Pages now faster and simpler with Jekyll 3.0 blog. It uses kramdown markdown which is very intuitive way to write.