Migrating my website to Hugo + Academic
After many years with a hand written website in HTML, I moved to using the Hugo framework with the Academic theme. The motivation for this is the work of Qingyuan Zhao who deserved the credit for both creating the template and also publishing it so that others can benefit from it. Thank you, Qingyuan Zhao!
The Hugo framework with the Academic theme
Based on Qingyuan’s work, I decided to use Hugo as it is an efficient language expressing the best aspects of markdown. The Academic theme for Hugo is well suited for the websites of academic researchers.
It helps to have Hugo installed locally as you can compile the website and see what you will get. Installing Hugo in Mac OS X is straightforward with homebrew. Simply run
brew install hugo
Creating a local website
First, clone my repository or Qingyuan’s. I put mine in “handcock.github.io”. Then rename it to <git hub ID>.github.io
You can preview the website by running
hugo server --baseURL https://localhost:1313/
from the website directory (e.g., “handcock.github.io”). This builds the website and creates a local web server to host it. It generates a link (the default is https://localhost:1313/) which can be pasted into a web browser. In the background, the hugo server also detects any change to the content and updates the website automatically.
Making it your website
The files are all writen as text files in markdown. The content sub-folder contains all the Markdown files
for website content.
├── content
│ ├── authors
│ ├── featured
│ ├── group
│ ├── home
│ ├── post
│ ├── project
│ ├── publication
│ ├── research
│ ├── talk
│ └── teaching
Most of its sub-directories correspond to a
section of my webpage (take a look at it); in particular, home corresponds to the
homepage of your website. Another unique folder is the authors,
which contains basic information about the website owner and all other
authors (not needed for a personal website). The publication corresponds to each of my publications.
Basically, you will edit the text files in each of these sub-directiries to change them to ones that are for you (as now they are all for me!).
See its documentation for more information.
Creating a public website
Commit your website as a repository on github (with <git hub ID>.github.io as a name).
After successfully committed, go to your repository and click on the “Settings” on the top right, then scroll down to the Github Pages section. Then click on the published link.