Resources for creating a blog/website for a Fortran learning journey

Hi great to see this Fortran community.
I am interested in Fortran for scientific computing - linear algebra, computational mechanics specifically.
I want to maintain a website recording my Fortran learning journey (from basics to developing advanced software) using the modern Fortran tools that this beautiful community is developing. It may be helpful for someone having similar interests.
So I wanted to know what tools you guys use to develop websites. I am a beginner - so I want to know easiest and sustainable way to develop and maintain the blog/website.

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Many people create GitHub accounts and post their initial programs in language X there, along with blog entries in Markdown. Beyond GitHub, two Fortran blogs are https://degenerateconic.com/ and Doctor Fortran - Ask Doctor Fortran. There are a few X/Twitter accounts focused on Fortran.

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I really like Quarto: An open-source scientific and technical publishing system. It allows you to easily setup either a standard website, a blog-oriented one, or an online book. Pages are written using a simple flavor of markdown developed by Quarto themselves and can include some Jupyter cells into it which get automatically run every time you publish the website (you can also pre-compute and freeze if the computations are quite heavy). Since it relies on Jupyter, it doesn’t naturally handle Fortran, but you can probably easily hack your way into it using LFortran and the Fortran Jupyter kernel developed by @certik.

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Using a static site builder and hosting it on GitHub Pages is a relatively easy way to go. For my site (https://samharrison.science), I use Hugo. It’s not perfect, but is quite flexible and powerful (and fast to build, but that’s only relevant if you have huge sites). There are tonnes of free templates that make it pretty easy to get started without needing to know much HTML/CSS. There’s a guide to setting up Hugo on GitHub Pages here: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

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My Doctor Fortran blog is done with Wordpress - it is really easy and works well. The downside is that the site is under constant attack by miscreants around the world. If you don’t allow comments and keep up with updates (WP can update automatically), and install limited add-ons, it’s fairly safe.

For my website I use Jupyter Book, which is similar to Quarto and can easily integrate with GitHub / GitLab pages.

If your site is about scientific computing, could you link to it?

To some extent :sweat_smile: my website is about wind turbine stability. Some of the plots are obtained with two software written in Fortran: HAWC2 and HAWCStab2.

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I also am thinking about creating my blog/website, and I think I will go for old-school static HTML approach (perhaps being generated from markdown). The reason being that I have seen enough services like blogspot be created and fall down, I would prefer my content to be easy to transfer somewhere else. (Actually same reason I distrust introducing dependencies into my projects in general – you don’t watch them for a while and you lose them.)

@samharrison7 thank you for sending Hugo, I found solution to my need :slight_smile:

Dominik

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I see your point, and that’s why I lock all the dependencies using Poetry. You can find here a workflow for FORD, but it applies just as well to Jupyter Book and Sphinx. So, until I decide to update nothing can break, and when it does the CI will never deploy a broken website.

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By the way, I use this package to convert Jupyter Notebooks to Hugo-friendly Markdown: GitHub - vlunot/nb2hugo: A Jupyter notebook to Hugo markdown converter.

Unfortunately it is no longer maintened, but it still works… I’m not sure what I’ll do if it ever stops working! Except take it on myself I suppose.

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