Make your own academicpages from scratch with jekyll

In this post I document the process I went through to set up a peronsal web site with a structure similar to the academicpages theme used by many academics. I’m writing the post for my future self, and for you if you want to do the same.

Why would you bother?

I wanted a site similar in style to academicpages, with links in the sidebar to Google Scholar, OrcID, etc., and the ability to use jekyll’s “collections” feature to easily organize publications, talks and teaching. But I also wanted the flexibility to change themes, which is not easy to do with academicpages. I love to support Python libraries like pelican, and some of the themes are very versatile, like their version of bootstrap. But somehow minimal-mistakes and other jekyll themes just look better to my (untrained) eye.

Last but not least, this is a fun exercise in using libraries in a language besides Python. It’s interesting to experience the tooling in the ecosystems of other programming languages.

How did we get here?

I’ve had a personal web page for sometime that I set up with pelican, a static web page generator in Python. Basically I adopted my approach from the one Jake Vanderplas took for his “pythonic perambulations” blog. However I wasn’t happy with how my page looked (which has nothing to do with Jake Vanderplas, and everything to do with my moribund graphic design and css/html skillz). And it was time to update my site anyway. Recently I noticed a collaborator had set up their own personal site using the excellent academicpages repository, developed by Stuart Geiger. academicpages is great if you are trying to survive in academia and you don’t have time to bother learning how to use a static site generator. With academicpages you just want to follow a couple steps to add your own content to some existing template, to easily get a site.

Some background: academicpages is a fork of minimal-mistakes, a very popular theme for the jekyll library. jekyyl is a static site generator written in the ruby programming language. You can think of it as analogous to pelican in Python (or Ruby developers might tell me that pelican is analgous to jekyll). One advantage of using jekyll is that GitHub really likes jekyll, letting developers easily create web pages for themselves or documentation for their projects through the GitHub Pages service. And it’s free, another plus for academics. Stuart modified the minimal-mistakes theme in such a way that other academics could simply fork its repo on GitHub and use the web interface to add their own content, without needing to know how to use jekyll or how to use any developer tools like git.

So I knew I wanted a site like academicpages, but I also knew there were things I wanted to modify, such as the theme / template. There’s little documentation in the academicpages guide about what changes were made to the minimal-mistakes theme, and why. How did Stuart evolve the template from your standard jekyll minimal blog page to a very specific set-up for academics? Unique features of academicpages include that it lands on the about page and shows a profile in the sidebar with links to academia specific sites, and includes tabs like “publications”, “talks”, etc.? I tried looking at the git commit history but couldn’t piece it together. I figured there couldn’t be too too many steps to setting up a similar site on my own.

Step-by-step guide to developing your own ‘academicpages’

Here’s the summary version first so you know what you’re getting into:

1. set up a jekyll development environment
2. make the landing page be your about page
3. make the sidebar show your profile with links
4. add links to publications, talks, etc., in the nav bar at the top of the page

Setting up a development environment

This is a thing that might be new to academics not familiar with software engineering, but the jekyll and ruby devs have worked really hard to make it easy.

• set up a basic environment for working with jekyll
  • their quickstart is here: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/
  • I’m on PopOS, a Linux distribution similar to Ubuntu, and I use oh-my-zsh, so I followed these instructions: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/ubuntu/ except I changed .bashrc to .zshrc
• then I followed the directions for managing dependencies with bundler so that I could install the minimal-mistakes template as a gem instead of forking their repo and modifying it
  • https://jekyllrb.com/tutorials/using-jekyll-with-bundler

Making the “landing page” be your “about” page

This is the first thing that’s specific to our site design.

• use the redirect plugin so that the site lands on “about”
• add an about.md – make sure you copy the YAML front matter from academicpages
• make sure _config.yml specifies defaults for pages so that your theme gets applied to this about.md file
  • I copied the #defaults section from the academicpages _config.yml

Making the sidebar show your profile, with links

Now we’re cooking with academicpages gas! Or something

• to make the author profile in the sidebar render all the links that are in academicpages but not in minimal-mistakes, i.e. academia specific things like a Google Scholar page, ORCID profile, etc., you’ll need to add an author-profile.html in an _includes directory. Basically I copied the author-profile.html from minimal-mistakes and then added the relevant if-then statements in the author-links section.
• for things like an author pic, I added them in assets/images/ – I think this is consider “idiomatic Jekyll” even though the academicpages repo just has an images folder in its root. Doesn’t matter too much as long as you specify the correct relative path in your _config.yml

Adding links to publications, talks, etc., in the masthead nav bar

Unique to academicpages are the links in the navigation bar at the top of the page to pages with lists of publications, talks, and so on.

If you want the same thing, there’s two things you’ll need to do:

1. you’ll need to copy the ‘navigation.yml’ file from academicpages, placing it in a data/ subfolder in your project root, and modify it as you see fit.
2. add two related sections in your _config.yml:
   • a ‘collections’ section, like this one in the academicpages _config.yml.
   • and corresponding keys in your defaults section as shown here in the academicpages _config.yml.

This is explained very briefly in the about.md of academicpages but here’s a quick explainer of how it all works. minimal-mistakes lets you add links to the masthead by supplying a file called navigation.yml. This is a standard approach in jekyll. There are other uses for data files. What’s specific to minimal-mistakes is that you add these links to the nav bar by specifying a main key in navigation.yml, as described here: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/navigation/. In the case of academicpages, the links have the names of the specific sections in the navigation.yml with the keys “publications”, “talks”, etc.

Coda: publishing, etc.

After making the changes just described, I had a site with a structure similar to academicpages.

To actually publish the site, I still use a workflow similar to what Jake Vanderplas uses for his blog: https://github.com/jakevdp/jakevdp.github.io-source This centers around a Makefile with commands for build and serve.

The key thing that makes it easy to publish to Github Pages is to use the ghp-import package, as suggested by the pelican docs: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/tips.html#project-pages. Of course, jekyll gets special treatment on GitHub so it’s kind of overkill, but I still like having a separate repo that I just push the .html and .css files to without thinking about it.

So this is how I have my site set up now! Stay tuned for it to change suddenly, because as a developer I love to spend hours farting around with tools that let me avoid real work. I’ll keep this post up for posterity anyway.