A program for creating and managing a static weblog with LaTeX math and diagrams.

This package provides a program for creating and managing a statically-generated, VCS-friendly, mathematically-inclined weblog. If you're interested in managing a blog with few moving parts and support for embedded LaTeX math, embedded function plotting, and the UNIX editor of your choice, then this is the blogging platform for you! For detailed information and a full feature list, please see the manual PDF in the doc directory.

mathblog

mathblog is a Haskell program targeted at people who want to write statically-generated, mathematically-themed weblogs. It supports:

• Extended Markdown input syntax as supported by the Pandoc library

• Inline and block-level TeX math rendered by MathJax or LaTeX

• Function graphing with TikZ / pgfplots LaTeX packages

• Integration of Javascript-based web services such as Disqus

• Template-based document rendering with support for layout and style customization

Getting Started

See the manual PDF in doc/.

Project vision

I wrote mathblog with a very specific set of requirements in mind, motivated by the following principles:

• A blog should be easy to create, host, and update.

• A blog should be easy to maintain.

• I should be able to edit posts in my editor of choice and write them in an intelligent textual markup language.

• It should be easy to embed high-quality mathematical symbols and equations in the blog posts.

As a result, mathblog has the following properties:

• The software is composed of a single executable which will automatically take care of creating your blog and regenerating pages when your post markup changes.

• All content is stored in plain text files and is generated statically. No database or web framework is used.

• A mathblog can be hosted with a simple static fileserver such as thttpd, Lighttpd, or Apache.

• Blog posts are written in the Markdown format with extensions, as supported by the Pandoc document converter.

• Math is embedded with $...$ or \(...\) for inline math and $$...$$ or \[...\] for block-level math.

These properties have some nice advantages; your blog content is cacheable and can be subjected to revision control. Posts are easy to edit and editing doesn't require a web browser. The static file representation model means you can compose a blog post on your laptop and get it just right using a local installation of mathblog, then push it up to your server to post it to your public blog.

Dependencies

mathblog takes advantage of three primary software components:

• Pandoc, a document-processing library.

• Math typesetting packages:

  • MathJax if you choose mathjax for the value of the mathBackend configuration setting. mathblog uses the MathJax CDN for MathJax resources.

• Function graph plotting packages:

  • The TikZ and pgfplots LaTeX packages if you set tikz = yes in your config. This is the recommended backend for function graph plotting.