More Playing With Categories
I spent another hour or so wrapping my mind around programming under Jekyll. The good news is that I have a much richer understanding of how it works and the various variables that are floating around the system. The bad news is that I didn’t really get any further in how I wanted the category pages to look.
I created a blank page layout, which allows me to create what is basically a straight HTML page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
{{ content }}
(Ironically, I needed to add extra Liquid code to make that display properly.)
I haven’t yet figured out the best way to create new pages through Jekyll. I tried putting just a regular HTML file into the main folder, but it didn’t show up on the website. However, if I put it inside of some other folder, it works just fine. So maybe that’s just something I’ll have to do. I am a little worried that bits of text may fall under the spell of the markdown encoder, but I could be wrong about whether it will do that. For playing with the Jekyll/Liquid stuff, this blank layout lets me try things, but if I wanted to actually build an HTML page directly, I would just have to dump it into a folder, and then it can be directly accessed as a file.
I created a test markdown page for me to play with the Liquid code. So far, everything is processing the way I expect it to, but every now and then something behaves differently than I think it should. Some of that is markdown taking over the symbols that are being used in the Liquid code, and sometimes it’s because I don’t know exactly what a variable is (and sometimes end up with whole webpages as a result).
One other small change I made to the default layout was to add code that allows the markdown to process LaTeX into math symbols. I just shoved that into the header because I wasn’t sure where it should go. Intuitively, it makes more sense to me for that to be part of the header than the footer. I don’t really intend to make complex LaTeX typesetting for the web, so it’s not going to be that big of a deal.