My first blog post

Hello world; here is my first blog post. I have spent a fairly good amount of time customizing my blog layout, and it is almost time to release the blog into the world. I am feeling tempted to change all of the fonts again, but I really like the look of MS PGothic. Please let me know if there is an issue on non-Windows devices; I do not own a Mac device and do not care to, so my ability to test layouts on other operating systems is nil. Oh, and if you use dark mode, please let me know if there is an issue with any colors that make them less accessible. I can go in and change it for the next update. I think I have fixed almost everything to use CSS custom properties, but you never know.

I am not yet sure what I will put on this blog. It could be interesting to put some thoughts on the readings I do for my health policy class, but the thing is that there are already about 60 readings that I have done so far and I don’t particularly feel like writing a bunch of backdated blogs for each one. Though I guess that could be a summer project? Haha. We will see if Neocities has PDF upload support then (I cannot remember). I am also considering the summer project of reading the entire Blitzstein and Hwang textbook on probability theory. But in reality, I will probably spend my summer break on things like “going on vacation with my husband” and “resting and relaxing”.

As you can probably tell, I’m using Hugo’s¹ static site generator to generate my blog. I’m also using the Neocities command-line interface² to push updates to the web site.

To test my website, I use the following batch script inside my website folder:

1@ECHO off
2:start
3ECHO This is the script where I test the site locally.
4START "firefox.exe" "http://localhost:1313"
5CALL hugo server -D

Of course, if you use a different web browser, you can try something like “chrome.exe” instead.

To push my website to the world wide web, I use the following batch script. I want to clear the public directory before building my site so that old pages don’t end up getting uploaded by accident.

 1@ECHO off
 2:start
 3ECHO This is the file where I upload the site to the web.
 4CALL hugo --cleanDestinationDir
 5
 6FOR /R  public\images\ %%a in (*.*) DO magick mogrify "%%~a[720x>]"
 7
 8CHOICE /N /C YN /M "Do you want to upload your site to Neocities? [Y/N]"
 9IF NOT errorlevel 2 IF errorlevel 1 GOTO Continue
10GOTO :EOF
11
12:Continue
13CALL neocities push public
14TIMEOUT 10

You might see an ImageMagick³ call in there. It’s to resize all the images that are over 720px before upload so that they don’t force people using my website to load huge images.

Anyway, it seems like Neocities is having severe issues for me when I use the CLI or try to upload the files through their web interface, so the date on this blog post may not be accurate to when it actually appears on the web.

Future plans for this site include implementing KaTex for math notation (though I could also make the choice to not use math on this site, which is also feasible). I’m considering implementing confetti⁴, though it is annoying (I will of course provide an option to turn the confetti off by setting reduced-motion preferences in the browser).