I finally decided to set up my website. I’d like to achieve these goals:

  1. This website should be static and hosted on github-page (instead of my own servers). I want to maximize my freedom of controlling the content while avoiding doing IT operations myself.
  2. The publication list should be readable, useful, and complementary to indexing services such as Google Scholar. It should give some aesthetic pleasure and contain related information such as code and bibtex for each paper. The list should be sorted by topic categories, unlike most academic websites that sort papers chronologically or alphabetically, which is already covered by Google Scholar.
  3. I should be able to publish blog posts on this website. I hope I can write more in the future about various topics, including paper explanation, technical tips, research philosophy, and everything else. Having said that, I won’t promise any bounds on update frequency for this blog :)
  4. The website should look great on both desktop and mobile screens, in major modern browsers (even with JavaScript disabled), and also in text-only browsers (such as ELinks).

After checking out a few options, I decided to develop the website myself to meet my goals, starting from the minima theme that comes with Jekyll. I have not been working on front-end development for quite some years. This time I learned something new and useful: cdnjs.com provides a great cache for javascript and CSS libraries, and Font Awesome and Academicons provide useful icon sets. The source code of this site is hosted on github and you are welcome to adopt it :)