Personal Website

Using personal website is an alternate way to present yourself other than CV. There are many tools that can help you build your website. I found Sphinx quite useful. The following section about Sphinx was presented during the Penn State Geoscience Computer Users Group meeting on 03/30/2016.


Making a Website Without Knowing HTML

The official website for Sphinx is http://www.sphinx-doc.org/. You can find detailed instructions about how to use it on the official website.

Installation

You can install Sphinx using Anaconda

conda install sphinx

or pip

pip install sphinx

For PCs, see instrucitons on this page.

Many projects are using Sphinx now, such as GMT, Numpy, matplotlib, pip.

Pros & Cons

Advantages of using Sphinx including

  • Don’t have to learn HTML syntax (and Python)
  • Less efforts on editing and maintaining
  • Supporting onversions to other formats, such as Latex and PDF

Disadvantages are

  • Not as flexible as HTML
  • Advanced features require additional Python packages
  • Using bash commands

Basic Process

  1. Use sphinx-quickstart to set up the framework
  2. Write text files with format markers
  3. Convert text files into HTML (make html) or other formats

Severs Available

From the department, you can use idocrase.geosc.psu.edu.

For seismology students, you may have access to eqseis.geosc.psu.edu.

Demo

You can find the example I used at this address http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cchai/SampleWebsite/.

If you click Show Source on the left, you will be able to see the text file related to this webpage.