I have been writing a blog since about 2011. I first used the blogger platform, then a fully hand-crafted, static platform based on Emacs and Org-mode. In fall 2019, I decided to adopt a Pelican-based setup, which is more flexible.
Meanwhile, I have been thinking a lot on how to make this website more eco-friendly. Two resources have made a deep impression on me
and I decided I would go low-tech, too. I will not go to extremes such as dithering all images, but I will try to limit as much as possible communications whith third-party servers. In particular:
Regarding the first point, using default fonts might result in ill-matched font sizes: in particular, depending on your web-browser, monospace fonts might appear larger or smaller than the remainder of the text. If you notice such problems, please send a message or report a bug on GitHub and I will do my best to improve the æsthetics of the website (although I am no web designer!).
The second point is more problematic, as I used to use
MathJax to render equations. I thought of several
options. Option 1 would be to use unicode only equations (see for example
the wonderful work done by the
SimPy
developers), but that option is far from ideal. Option 2 would be to
generate MathML code with my own
PyMathML library, but my understanding
is that MathML is still not widely supported. Option 3 is
KaTeX, which is a light-weight alternative to
MathJax. I chose option 3, and I am quite happy with
this solution: posts with a lot of equations load much faster now. Although the
LaTeX coverage is not as wide as MathJax, the
overall result is quite satisfactory. I use a self-hosted, minified version of
the KaTeX CSS file.
As for the third point – well, we will have to resort to low-tech tools. If you would like to comment on one of my posts (including this one), please send an email to sebastien [dot] brisard [at] ifsttar [dot] fr. Your comment will be published alongside the post. I will of course not publish your email address.