Matan Abudy

Moving from Jekyll to Bear

I set up my personal website a few months ago, just before going to NeurIPS (people said an online presence was important!). I used the popular academic al-folio theme, which I’ve seen frequently when browsing academic personal websites.

My setup was simple: a custom domain, GitHub Pages for hosting and GitHub Actions for publishing anytime I pushed to the repository containing the website. It was nice, but I discovered some issues. Before listing them, I will say that these are issues that interfered with me, and other people may not find them to be issues at all (and may even see them as features).

  1. Clutter: al-folio has many features that I don’t use and don’t see myself using. While it was nice to have support for citing publications using BibTeX (not that I have more than one at the moment…), it felt too complicated for my needs.
  2. Hard to update: I love updating my software, and I wanted to keep my website updated with any new updates that al-folio might present. That became a problem when I realized that I had to do a complicated merge that wouldn’t incorporate any incoming changes to features I did not use.
  3. Too generic: I felt that it was quite hard for me to make the website my own. If I wanted to use all the academic features of al-folio, my website would need to look more or less like any other academic personal website I encountered. I wanted something unique.

Enter Bear.

The first thing that hooked me was the minimalism - the platform website is clean, not cluttered, and just a joy to read. The second was the philosophy behind it - I read Building software to last forever and was really intrigued. I’m not sure whether this is a feasible goal, but it is more a statement by the owner and the developer. So I’ve been playing with the idea of moving my old static website from Jekyll to Bear, and I finally did it today.

The process was rather quick (I had only one blog post and everything in Jekyll is Markdown anyway), and soon enough, I had my new blog up and running, clean and beautiful. As a final note, I hope this move and this post in particular will mark my return to writing about things I care and think about.