With exams over I can finally start concentrating on finding a job posting more to my blog. I have been working on a Sudoku solver and puzzle generator over the past couple of months and was keen to write this up now I have the time, but I felt frustrated that the code wasn't really going to be of use without some form of web based user interface.

A Web Based Python UI?¶

After exploring multiple options I'm still not convinced there is an ideal solution that doesn't involve learning Javascript or migrating the site from GitHub. If I'm overlooking something obvious please leave a comment. The best solution I can find is to impliment a degree of interactivity using Jupyter Notebook Widgets, unfortunately this interactivity is lost when converting the notebooks to html using Pelican, so it's still neccessary to link to the file hosted on GitHub. Either way, I'm excited about the potential this functionality offers for some other projects I have in mind for the future.

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On to the second part of the series documenting the process of setting up this blog. This post will cover setting up GitHub pages and pushing your website, looking at options for customisation such as theme, and finally creating some batch files to streamline the process for adding a new post to the blog to avoid excessive use of terminal.

GitHub Pages and gbp-import¶

• If you don't already have one, create an account on GitHub
• Create a new repository with the name yoursite.github.io without creating a readme or .gitignore
• Return to terminal and install ghp-import using: pip install ghp-pages
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Word on the town, getting in the habit of documenting your work with Jupyter notebooks is great practise. Jupyter notebooks allow you to create and share documents containing code and rich text, to demonstrate your workflows and visualisations. On a more personal level, it gives you some freedom to be forgetful and know you'll always have an easy repository to remember how you tackled a problem in the past.

The next logical step is how can I use these files to generate content for a blog, without having to reformat and convert any visualisations in to static images? And Pelican it seems, is the answer.

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