@hamelsmu
TL/DR: after enabling extra markdown output, my blog now seems frozen in time: new changes to master don’t appear in gh-pages. Can I ‘clean’ and rebuild?
More info:
I had set BOOL_SAVE_MARKDOWN to true in .github/workflows/ci.yaml as per your instructions, then turned it back to false after the extra git push processing became tedious.
And then deleted some of my notebooks (with git rm), and modified some text in the notebooks, and renamed some markdown posts (with git mv), but… now whenever my blog builds (successfully, with a green CI badge), nothing ever changes: all the old files are still on the blog, and the changes I made in the notebook files themselves aren’t reflected in the build.
they appear correct and up to date in my master branch, but in the gh-pages branch they’re “old”.
How does one fix this?
Is there some kind of automated ‘purge’ or ‘clean’ I can trigger, or do I need to just manually start deleting things from the gh-pages branch?
(and hard-reloading the browser, clearing cache, etc., has no effect btw.)
Good question! remove appropriate markdown files from _posts (be careful not to delete posts that you originally written in markdown, though!)
Don’t touch the gh-pages branch, that is wiped out and rebuilt on each push to your master branch.
By the way, on your earlier title issue - on the next release of fastpages I will forcefully remove colons from the front matter (meaning colons will disappear from your title) as a way to defend against malformed inputs.
I’m not sure why you would have trouble with this though, it could be that all the changing things caused a merge conflict. Hard to tell, but either way removing _posts should help enforce a fresh build.
Ah, so the titles are getting treated as yaml? That may explain why a (different) markdown post of mine with => in the title got formatted to read =>, which looked kind of weird.
I changed it to a proper double-arrow Unicode symbol and it’s all fine now.
UPDATE: Everything is magic now. No errors that I can see in the full blog build.
You may like to use the _dev_tools where you can see what happens to your notebooks as you convert them to jekyll compliant blog posts in the _posts folder. I think that may help you demystify how everything is working.
If not familiar with Jekyll it also doesn’t hurt to go through this: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/ ( I think you already familiar with much of it)
Perhaps you can help me write better docs, etc. Since you have been very patient!
Edit: also a blog post on your experiences for newcomers might not be a bad idea either, of course once you feel comfortable.
Yea, definitely I can help with more input on this. I really want the students in my college’s developers club to try this, and I’ve been encouraging my research students to make blog portfolios of their work (for helping to get jobs, etc.), and just want fastpages to be “robust” for when they start doing it.
…if they start doing it, hah! But my students this semester are good!
@hamelsmu is there any way users can “keep” colons in titles?
I have a bunch of Colab notebooks that have titles such as
# Something Something Part X: Blah Blah
It’s not a huge inconvenience to require users to manually change the colon to something like a period or a semicolon,…and I understand that needs of YAML means colons are reserved… Just thought I’d ask anyway.