I spent a lot of time getting Jekyll to work with Github pages and tweaking its default theme – with the end goal having been driven by wanting to blog about the machine learning book I’ve started reading – An Introduction to Statistical Learning. I wanted to describe a math expression mentioned in that book, and for the description (and the equation) to not look like crap.

In order to achieve this goal, I had to upgrade from the basic GH-Pages + Jekyll setup to being able to edit my own HTML files, in order to be able to use MathJax, as per the instructions here. In order to do this I followed the instructions. The generated Gemfile provided instructions for how to switch over to the github-pages Gem, which is necessary to deploy the site to gh-pages.

I also had to remember to use protocol-relative urls to grab the MathJax script file from the CDN.. everything was working on localhost but not on the production server, which serves only over HTTPS, just like all Github Pages.. so that took about an extra hour.

Finally, it gives me great pleasure to say that when \(a \ne 0\), there are two solutions to \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\) and they are \begin{align}
x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a} \end{align} !