Yuxiao Wu

Yuxiao Wu

Short biography for the left-hand sidebar

About me

This is the front page of a website that is powered by the Academic Pages template and hosted on GitHub pages. GitHub pages is a free service in which websites are built and hosted from code and data stored in a GitHub repository, automatically updating when a new commit is made to the repository. This template was forked from the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Theme created by Michael Rose, and then extended to support the kinds of content that academics have: publications, talks, teaching, a portfolio, blog posts, and a dynamically-generated CV. You can fork this template right now, modify the configuration and markdown files, add your own PDFs and other content, and have your own site for free, with no ads!

Research Interests

Like many other Jekyll-based GitHub Pages templates, Academic Pages makes you separate the website’s content from its form. The content & metadata of your website are in structured markdown files, while various other files constitute the theme, specifying how to transform that content & metadata into HTML pages. You keep these various markdown (.md), YAML (.yml), HTML, and CSS files in a public GitHub repository. Each time you commit and push an update to the repository, the GitHub pages service creates static HTML pages based on these files, which are hosted on GitHub’s servers free of charge.

Many of the features of dynamic content management systems (like Wordpress) can be achieved in this fashion, using a fraction of the computational resources and with far less vulnerability to hacking and DDoSing. You can also modify the theme to your heart’s content without touching the content of your site. If you get to a point where you’ve broken something in Jekyll/HTML/CSS beyond repair, your markdown files describing your talks, publications, etc. are safe. You can rollback the changes or even delete the repository and start over - just be sure to save the markdown files! Finally, you can also write scripts that process the structured data on the site, such as this one that analyzes metadata in pages about talks to display a map of every location you’ve given a talk.

News

  • Register a GitHub account if you don’t have one and confirm your e-mail (required!)
  • Fork this template by clicking the “Use this template” button in the top right.
  • Go to the repository’s settings (rightmost item in the tabs that start with “Code”, should be below “Unwatch”). Rename the repository “[your GitHub username].github.io”, which will also be your website’s URL.
  • Set site-wide configuration and create content & metadata (see below – also see this set of diffs showing what files were changed to set up an example site for a user with the username “getorg-testacct”)
  • Upload any files (like PDFs, .zip files, etc.) to the files/ directory. They will appear at https://[your GitHub username].github.io/files/example.pdf.

For more info

More info about configuring Academic Pages can be found in the guide, the growing wiki, and you can always ask a question on GitHub. The guides for the Minimal Mistakes theme (which this theme was forked from) might also be helpful.