The site is driven by Nikola, a static site generator written in Python. I chose Nikola for a few reasons:

• It’s written in Python, making it easy for me to understand
• It’s very configurable, with a lot of pre-packaged themes and plugins, and easy to extend as the need arises
• It’s reasonably well-documented
• It’s extremely flexible in terms of input formats

The last point is the most important. Because I have content in lots of different formats corresponding to the different incarnations of this site, I need to be able to re-use those different formats and not have to re-type or translate them. Not only can Nikola use all that content, it also leverages to strengths of the different file formats and allows them to be integrated: markdown, reStructured text, plain text, HTML, Jupyter notebooks, and (as we’ll see) org mode, with metadata either inline or held in a separate .meta file. Very flexible, although it does occasionally mean that the presentation of older content is a bit off.

Nikola is easy to theme and re-theme. I’ve used several different themes over the years. The current one is based on Libretto, modified in several ways to adjust presentation and add things like social sharing buttons and RSS subscriptions.

I use Github to version-control content, as well as obviously for my software development. Githib pages are web sites built directly from code repos. I’ve used them to host my book on epidemic modelling. Nikola comes with a plugin that publishes directly to Github pages, making it easy to host and deploy the site. So I get hosting for free alongside version control.

Almost all my coding, writing, and note-taking is done in Emacs using Org mode, a plain-text hypertext system with an amazing set of capabilities. Nikola has an org mode plugin that can render org markup alongside other content formats, so new content can be written using the tool I usually use without having to re-write older articles.

I draw a distinction between my notebook and my site – the former is for my use and is probably unintelligible to anyone else, the latter is material deliberately written for public consumption. I have a set of Emacs functions to simplify moving from one to the other.

“Minimal”, not “no”, JavaScript.

Laying-out maths is a complicated process that is best performed client-side. I use MathJax for this, which takes the LaTeX maths markup that almost all scientists use and renders it in HTML.

I also have some small fragments of JavaScript elsewhere around the site, for example to provide the “Share to Mastodon” buttons on articles.

I tried the site on several devices: on proper screens, on a phone, and on eww, the Emacs Web Wowser mainly-text browser. Everything is readable, images are included and properly sized, and navigation works. Maths markup doesn’t get expanded on eww since there’s no JavaScript at all in Emacs, although if you’re using Emacs in the first place I’m guessing you can read the LaTeX maths format anyway.