HeavyBall Research — Lab Blog

Source for the lab website / blog. Built with Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages.

Writing a post

1. Create _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug.md, using an existing post as a reference. The filename date is the publish date and becomes part of the URL: /blog/YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug/.
2. Fill in the front matter (title, authors, optional tldr, image, links) and set published: true when the post is ready to publish.
3. Put images in assets/posts/YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug/ and reference them as {{ '/assets/posts/YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug/fig.png' | relative_url }}.
4. Markdown, LaTeX ($...$, $$...$$, \begin{equation}), fenced code, and raw HTML all work.
5. Open a PR against main. Once merged, GitHub Pages rebuilds in ~1–2 min.

Whole-post HTML: name the file .html instead of .md, keep the front matter.

Local preview

Requires Ruby ≥ 3.1 (brew install ruby on macOS — avoid the system Ruby).

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload
# → http://127.0.0.1:4000

For work in progress, create _drafts/ and add posts without date prefixes. Add --drafts to preview them locally; normal builds omit drafts.

Layout

_config.yml          site settings, permalink style, math engine
_layouts/            default.html (shell), post.html, page.html
_includes/           authors.html (author list), mathjax.html
_posts/              published posts
blog/index.html      post list
people/index.md      lab members
index.md             landing page
assets/style.css     all styling
assets/posts/<slug>/ per-post images
CNAME                custom domain (created by GitHub when you set it; don't delete)

Custom domain

_config.yml → url: must match the live domain so RSS/SEO links are right. DNS and HTTPS are configured in the repo's Settings → Pages.