Update as of December 2014: Don’t bother using what’s below; go to Christop Corley’s blog for a much better setup!
I’ve been playing around with iPython notebooks for a while and planning to use them instead of SAGE worksheets for my numerical analysis course next spring. As a warmup, I wrote an iPython notebook explaining a bit about internal stability of Runge-Kutta methods and showing some new research results using NodePy.
I also wanted to post the notebook on my blog here; the ability to
more easily include math and code in blog posts was one of my main
motivations for moving away from Blogger to my own site. I first tried
following the
instructions given by Fernando Perez. That was quite painless and
worked flawlessly, using nbconvert.py to convert the .ipynb
file directly to HTML, with graphics embedded. The only issue was that I
didn’t love the look of the output quite as much as I love how Carl
Boettiger’s Markdown + Jekyll posts with code and math look (see an
example here).
Besides, Markdown is so much nicer than HTML, and
nbconvert.py has a Markdown output option.
So I tried the markdown option:
nbconvert.py my_nb.ipynb -f markdownI copied the result to my _posts/ directory, added the
YAML
front-matter that Jekyll expects, and took a look. Everything was
great except that all my plots were gone, of course. After considering a
few options, I decided for now to put plots for such posts in a
subfolder jekyll_images/ of my public Dropbox folder. Then
it was a simple matter of search/replace all the paths to the images. At
that point, it looked great; you can see the source
and the result.
The only issue was that I didn’t want to manually do all that work
every time. I considered creating a new Converter class in
nbconvert to handle it, but finally decided that it would
be more convenient to just write a shell script that calls
nbconvert and then operates on the result.
Here it is:
#!/bin/bash
fname=$1
nbconvert.py ${fname}.ipynb -f markdown
sed -i '' "s#${fname}_files#https:\/\/dl.dropbox.com\/u\/656693\/jekyll_images\/${fname}_files#g" ${fname}.md
dt=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d")
echo "0a
---
layout: post
time: ${dt}
title: TITLE-ME
subtitle: SUBTITLE-ME
tags: TAG-ME
---
.
w" | ed ${fname}.md
mv ${fname}.md ~/labnotebook/_posts/${dt}-${fname}.mdIt’s also on Github here. This was a nice educational exercise in constructing shell scripts, in which I learned or re-learned:
You can expect a lot more iPython-notebook based posts in the future.