Andrea Bocci Web Site#

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This web site is an evolving experiment, eternally work in progress, and an amalgam of different styles and layouts.

By design.

I work in tech, where there are always new stuff coming out to try and test.

This site follows a similar approach. I experiment different layouts and documentation frameworks to mumbling about data science and other (technical) topics that often includes code, plots or math equations.

Why Sphinx?#

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/_static/sphinxheader.png

There are plenty of static web page framework out there. In the past I was using Pelican (highly recommended!) for example, But in recent years I was accumulating notes in notebook format and my wish-list for a personal website/blog evolved into including:

A pythonic framework
Pages in markdown, better with richer capability (like reStructureText)
Easy conversion of (jupyter) notebooks to blog posts for this web site
While having fun writing content to this web site, become more proficient on properly/automatically documenting code, projects and libraries.

Clearly there was nothing around that could really fit the bill, in particular in the popular Jekyll ecosystem, as I still want to experiment with Jupyter Book, Quarto, Executable Books Project, Edward Tufte markdown and other stuff like that.

But eventually I found Sphinx with PyData-sphinx-theme, a good compromise. This post from Chris Holdgraf gives actually quite a few compelling arguments to use it as blog framework.

So I did what any Data Scientist does to start from scratch a new project: I forked a repository!

In my case Chris Holdgraf web page that I profoundly thank for the excellent work and documentation about his web site (I still have to implement the GitHub Actions he uses to automatize the deployment…).

Site Structure#

(Information taken from Chris Holdgraf web page)

Where is the blog source code? (TBD)
What engine builds the website? The Sphinx documentation engine is the core documentation engine.
What engine builds the blog? I use the ablog Sphinx blog extension to host the actual blog.
What theme do you use for the blog? I use the PyData Sphinx Theme
How do you write Sphinx docs in markdown? I use the myst-parser package
How do you write content in notebooks? I use the MyST-NB package.
How did you make those fancy buttons and dropdowns? That was the sphinx-panels Sphinx extension.

Content#

This will be a blog-style web site, but I will experiment with layouts.

Data Science topics: Usual Medium-like articles, probably more advanced, on stuff I tried first hand or I like to discuss. Including Statistic and other relevant topics.
Project topics: Those may require multiple pages, and layout more similar to proper documentation or html-book (thinking at Jupyter Book or Quarto) Experimenting in this area is actually one of the motivation to start this web site
Other topics: Again to experiment different layout, for example Edward Tufte markdown, using old notes or other format I have. Mainly about data analysis of some interesting topics on the news or particularly popular (I have few ones Covid-related), always with a data spin. Or some math. Or astronomy. Or else.