Academic Pages

Academic Pages is a GitHub Pages template for personal and professional portfolio-oriented websites.

Getting Started

1. Register a GitHub account if you don't have one and confirm your e-mail (required!)
2. Click the "Use this template" button in the top right.
3. On the "New repository" page, enter your public repository name as "[your GitHub username].github.io", which will also be your website's URL.
4. Set site-wide configuration and add your content.
5. Upload any files (like PDFs, .zip files, etc.) to the files/ directory. They will appear at https://[your GitHub username].github.io/files/example.pdf.
6. Check status by going to the repository settings, in the "GitHub pages" section
7. (Optional) Use the Jupyter notebooks or python scripts in the markdown_generator folder to generate markdown files for publications and talks from a TSV file.

See more info at https://academicpages.github.io/

AI statements for blog posts and notes

Set ai_statement in a blog post's YAML front matter to choose one of three fixed statements. The selected label appears above the post body; click it to expand the statement.

Value	Label	Statement
human	Human-created	I created this post, with little or no AI-generated content.
balanced	Human–AI collaboration	I created this post in collaboration with AI, with comparable human and AI contributions.
ai	Primarily AI-generated	This post was created primarily using AI.

For example, add this field alongside the post's title and date:

ai_statement: balanced

Omitting the field or setting it to true uses human, preserving the default for existing posts. Set ai_statement: false to hide the statement. Unrecognized values also hide it; they do not display custom text or default to a human-created claim. Choose the preset yourself to reflect how the post was created.

Notes in _notes can opt in by setting ai_statement explicitly; omitting it keeps the statement hidden for notes. Statements do not appear on the home page. The fixed labels and wording are maintained in _data/ai_statements.yml.

Math in Markdown previews

Set math: true in a page's front matter to enable $...$ inline formulas on the site. Use $$ on separate lines for display equations. This syntax also works in VS Code's built-in Markdown preview. Existing pages using escaped \(...\) delimiters do not need to change.

Running locally

When you are initially working on your website, it is very useful to be able to preview the changes locally before pushing them to GitHub. To work locally you will need to:

1. Clone the repository and made updates as detailed above.

Using a different IDE

1. Make sure you have ruby-dev, bundler, and nodejs installed

   On most Linux distribution and Windows Subsystem Linux the command is:

   sudo apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler nodejs

   If you see error Unable to locate package ruby-bundler, Unable to locate package nodejs , run the following:

   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

   then try run sudo apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler nodejs again.

   On MacOS the commands are:

   brew install ruby
   brew install node
   gem install bundler

2. Run bundle install to install ruby dependencies. If you get errors, delete Gemfile.lock and try again.

   If you see file permission error like Fetching bundler-2.6.3.gem ERROR: While executing gem (Gem::FilePermissionError) You don't have write permissions for the /var/lib/gems/3.2.0 directory. or Bundler::PermissionError: There was an error while trying to write to /usr/local/bin. Install Gems Locally (Recommended):

   bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'

   then try run bundle install again. If succeeded, you should see a folder called vendor and .bundle.

3. Run jekyll serve -l -H localhost to generate the HTML and serve it from localhost:4000 the local server will automatically rebuild and refresh the pages on change to Markdown (*.md) and HTML files, while changes to the core template and configuration (i.e., _config.yml) will require stoping and restarting Jekyll. You may also try bundle exec jekyll serve -l -H localhost to ensure jekyll to use specific dependencies on your own local machine.

If you are running on Linux it may be necessary to install some additional dependencies prior to being able to run locally: sudo apt install build-essential gcc make

Using Docker

Working from a different OS, or just want to avoid installing dependencies? You can use the provided Dockerfile to build a container that will run the site for you if you have Docker installed.

You can build and execute the container by running the following command in the repository:

chmod -R 777 .
docker compose up

You should now be able to access the website from localhost:4000.

Using the DevContainer in VS Code

If you are using Visual Studio Code you can use the Dev Container that comes with this Repository. Normally VS Code detects that a development container configuration is available and asks you if you want to use the container. If this doesn't happen you can manually start the container by F1->DevContainer: Reopen in Container. This restarts your VS Code in the container and automatically hosts your academic page locally on http://localhost:4000. All changes will be updated live to that page after a few seconds.

Maintenance

Bug reports and feature requests to the template should be submitted via GitHub. For questions concerning how to style the template, please feel free to start a new discussion on GitHub.

This repository was forked (then detached) by Stuart Geiger from the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Theme, which is © 2016 Michael Rose and released under the MIT License (see LICENSE.md). It is currently being maintained by Robert Zupko and additional maintainers would be welcomed.

Bugfixes and enhancements

If you have bugfixes and enhancements that you would like to submit as a pull request, you will need to fork this repository as opposed to using it as a template. This will also allow you to synchronize your copy of template to your fork as well.

Unfortunately, one logistical issue with a template theme like Academic Pages that makes it a little tricky to get bug fixes and updates to the core theme. If you use this template and customize it, you will probably get merge conflicts if you attempt to synchronize. If you want to save your various .yml configuration files and markdown files, you can delete the repository and fork it again. Or you can manually patch.

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